A woman charged with harbouring an escaped jail inmate accused two cops who'd just testified against her of lying as she left a courtroom Wednesday afternoon.

'You guys always swear on bibles and lie?' Raven Tsandaya, 42, asked two uniformed constables seated in the back row as another RCMP guard led her back to the courthouse cells.

In the hall leading from the courtroom to the cells, the woman could be heard yelling, and earlier, as Const. Lilliane Frechette left the stand, Tsandaya, also known as Beverly Smith, shook her head and frowned.

The trial was adjourned because the next police officer to testify is currently on leave. The matter will be back in court Friday afternoon to schedule a continuation date.

Frechette told the court she'd arrived at work for a 12-hour day shift last Nov. 25 to learn Stephen Haga had escaped the Whitehorse Correctional Centre two days earlier, and that the RCMP had a warrant to enter the McIntyre subdivision home in which he was believed to be staying.

Later that day, Frechette and the rookie constable she was training cruised by Tsandaya's home on McCandless Crescent to see a woman walk up to the door and a man answer.

The man looked just like Haga.

'The door shut quickly,' Frechette testified Wednesday.

Frechette and her partner stood on opposite ends of the house so they could see if anyone tried to leave, and called in other officers to help.

A woman later identified as Tsandaya walked out the front door and into a house across the street. Ten to 15 minutes later, four constables arrived and helped surround the place.

Frechette went across the street to check with the woman if there were any weapons in the house or if she thought Haga would be violent. When she found Tsandaya in the kitchen, the woman's eyes looked red from crying, the constable testified.

'She told me he'd been there for the last couple of days,' Frechette said under cross-examination. 'She didn't elaborate on that.'

Tsandaya told her the cops had been at her door the night before, but she'd been too scared to give Haga up then, Frechette told the court. Tsandaya had been waiting for the police to come back so she could hand Haga over.

Frechette went back across the street where uniformed officers and police dog handler Cpl. Rod Hamilton couldn't find anyone else inside.

When police dog Justice started indicating he'd found something in the hall, the officers looked up to see an attic trap door in the ceiling. Haga was found inside, and gave himself up peacefully. He's since been convicted for the escape.

Const. Ray Warner testified briefly about how a man named Thorin Mullin let the police in through a side door and how he propped the trap door open with a two-by-four to find Haga.

Yellow Cab driver Leonard Archer told the court he'd picked up a man he was '80-per-cent' sure was Haga after bar closing around the time the man escaped. The cabbie said he drove him to the McCandless Crescent home where police later found Haga. The man never paid the fare, and tried to give him a ring to cover it, Archer said, noting he didn't actually see the man enter the home.

The first of the three police officers to testify so far, Const. Michael Buxton-Carr, said he did a curfew check on Tsandaya the evening of Nov. 26, as his duties include enforcing court orders. Tsandaya was on a conditional sentence at the time.

Working in plain clothes as part of the Whitehorse detachment's investigation section, Buxton-Carr said he talked to the woman to determine if she'd been drinking. At one point in the few minutes he was there, Buxton-Carr brought up Haga.

'I meant to call you guys and I didn't,' the cop recounted of Tsandaya's response. 'I should have got around to that.'

Defence lawyer Gord Coffin told Judge John Faulkner much of the constable's evidence was 'news to me,' and the prosecutor noted disclosure had only been made to the defence that morning.

The court heard Buxton-Carr didn't make any notes of his conversation with Tsandaya, and that he told neither the officer handling the Haga investigation nor the Crown about what he'd learned.

He was under the impression Tsandaya wasn't being charged, Buxton-Carr said. He noted he simply forgot about the conversation until the night before, when he listened to Frechette go over her notes to prepare for the trial.

He testified he didn't tell the other constable what Tsandaya had told him.

While he wasn't completely sure the curfew check was Nov. 26, he told the court he was certain it wasn't a week or two later, as Tsandaya insisted when she took the stand during a voir dire hearing to determine whether her statement to Buxton-Carr was admissible.

She testified she never told the plainclothes cop named Mike who arrived at her door anything about Haga. The officer said he was there to do a curfew check, and then 'he started drilling me' about Haga and why he'd been at her home, said Tsandaya.

The officer asked if Haga had been looking for drugs, telling her all the police in town knew her as a drug dealer, she said.

'I kept saying, I don't know.''

'We never had that conversation,' she said about Buxton-Carr's evidence she'd admitted Haga was at her home for two days, noting she thought 'Mike' was an undercover drug cop.

An impromptu witness in the voir dire, probation officer Janet Constable-Rushant said she'd done a curfew check at Tsandaya's home Nov. 26, and gave the woman an appointment time for the next day after Tsandaya said she wanted to speak to her about something. Tsandaya never showed for that appointment, Constable-Rushant said.

Instead, she referred to her case notes about a Dec. 5 conversation with Tsandaya when the woman told her a guy she didn't know, named Mike, had been at her house the night before.

Mike told her he'd be checking on her regularly to make sure she was complying with her court ordered conditions, Constable-Rushant recalled from her meeting with Tsandaya.

'She said they had a really nice conversation,' the probation officer testified. The woman never said anything about the conversation with Mike being an interrogation or being about drugs or where Haga was during his escape, she continued.

Faulkner said the evidence that Tsandaya's brief meeting with Buxton-Carr was 'a pleasant chit-chat' rather than the interrogation she claimed it was when he ruled the officer's evidence admissible.

The constable must have simply been mistaken about the curfew check's date, Faulkner said.