Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  In his letters, Millard asks Noudga to witness tamper and get his best friend to change his statement to police. “If he knew that his words were going to get me a life sentence, he would want to change them,” Millard wrote. “Show him how he can, and he will change them.” He instructed Noudga to destroy his letters, but—whether for sentimental reasons or as an insurance policy or both—she defied his wishes and kept them. The very damaging letters were seized from her bedroom when it was searched upon her arrest.

  Noudga’s arrest occurred the same day Millard and Smich were charged with another murder, that of twenty-three-year-old Laura Babcock, on or around July 3, 2012, in the area of Toronto, ten months before Bosma’s death. Millard alone was also charged with the murder, on November 29, 2012, of his father, Wayne. Although not a word will be heard about those cases at the Tim Bosma trial, the complications of prosecuting three overlapping murder cases, not to mention their multijurisdictional nature, are among the reasons it has taken almost three years for the trial for the murder of Tim Bosma to begin. From the test drive on May 6, 2013, to February 1, 2016, when Craig Fraser addresses the jury, a thousand and one days have elapsed.

  Throughout this time, someone from Tim Bosma’s family has attended every single court date for Dellen Millard and Mark Smich, from two-minute video appearances to the full days of pretrial motions that took place in the fall of 2015. In the face of trial delays and tedious legal arguments about evidence admissibility and the like, Tim’s parents, Hank and Mary, have remained outwardly stoic—and frequently cheerful. Hank, a small, wiry man with a grey moustache, bald head, and glasses, will often approach journalists to tell them he likes an article they wrote or a TV report they did about his son. He will joke in the elevator of Hamilton’s John Sopinka Courthouse about little things like where to get a coffee and make it back to court in time. Mary, a petite blonde, is more shy, but like her husband she smiles when she wishes everyone Merry Christmas on the last day of pretrial motions. The Bosmas’ faith—they are active members of the Ancaster Christian Reformed Church—has helped carry them through, as have the many friends who have accompanied them to court in the days, months, and years since Tim was taken from them.

  —

  EXCEPT FOR SOME MEMBERS of the defendants’ families, a few of their friends, and the usual handful of conspiracy theorists, this is not, for the vast majority of people, a trial about guilt. It’s far more about the how and the why of what happened to Tim Bosma and the very nature of evil. It’s also about the dread that almost every major murder trial brings to the surface—the fear that justice will not be done. There might be a “glove doesn’t fit” moment, a secret “deal with the devil.” Or, in this case, one of the accused might succeed in blaming the other and walk away with no more than a few years in jail.

  ONE

  IT’S JUST A TRUCK

  DAY 1—MONDAY, MAY 6

  The two men walked up the unfinished gravel driveway to Tim and Sharlene Bosma’s big new house just after 9 P.M. on May 6, 2013. The test drive, which had been arranged by phone, was originally supposed to have taken place earlier in the evening, when it would have still been light out. But the men were late getting in from Toronto, and it was almost dark when they arrived.

  Although the location of Tim and Sharlene’s home has often been described as country, it is more accurate to call it semirural. The house sits on a well-trafficked road in one of those areas that combine cornfields with transmission towers. It is not deserted, but it’s also not the kind of place you stroll up to for a visit. Nor is it somewhere you walk to from the nearest bus stop—especially when you’re showing up for the first time on a dark spring night. Presumably the visitors would have had to offer some kind of explanation as to how they had arrived from Toronto, one hundred kilometres to the northeast, on foot.

  Exactly what they did or didn’t say is one of those questions that has been the subject of speculation from the very beginning of this case. In the days after Tim Bosma disappeared, one of his friends placed an ad on Kijiji, one of the two websites where Tim had advertised his truck for sale. The idea was that someone who knew something might see the ad and provide some information. It read, “2 nights ago 3 guys came to look at [a truck] in ancaster. 2 got dropped off. And the other guy said he would be back. Our friend tim bosma took the other 2 guys for a test drive near the fairgrounds in ancaster. No one ever came back.”

  There are a number of variations on this story: one where the third guy goes to Tim Hortons for coffee, another where he goes to gas up, and a third where he both buys coffee and fills up on gas. The only thing known for sure about the visitors’ tale is that it worked. The test drive went ahead as planned. Tim was, after all, used to dealing with strangers. It was something he did regularly as part of his job as an HVAC contractor. He was six foot one, in good shape, and easily able to take care of himself.

  When he left, Tim smiled at his wife and told her he would be right back. Then he climbed into the passenger seat of his truck while the taller of the two visitors drove and the one wearing a red hoodie sat in the rear. When he didn’t return at the appointed time, Sharlene called his cell phone. No answer. She tried again and probably again and again. She almost certainly called family members and best friends. And then she phoned the police.

  DAY 2—TUESDAY, MAY 7

  A short press release about the Tim Bosma case was issued by the Hamilton Police Service at eight o’clock the next morning. It said very briefly that Tim Bosma, age thirty-two, had gone missing. It didn’t mention anything about a test drive or men from Toronto. Those details first surfaced on Facebook, where the news of the disappearance was widely shared. It was sent first to Tim and Sharlene’s friends, then to their acquaintances, and pretty soon to people who had no idea who Tim Bosma was.

  It didn’t hurt that this man who had disappeared was easy on the eyes: blond, blue-eyed, smiling. In the photos being passed around on social media, Tim could be seen posing with his bride on their wintry wedding day. Then, ten months later, he was snapped at the hospital, a typically proud first-time father, not quite sure how to hold his new daughter, born on Christmas Day. By the time spring rolled around, however, he had morphed into a daring dad, taking the baby for tractor rides on his lap while the family’s Great Dane, Ava, looked on. Inasmuch as it’s possible to come to a conclusion from looking at photos, the consensus was that Tim Bosma was clearly not the type of guy to run off to Vegas or go on a bender with two strangers from out of town.

  DAY 3—WEDNESDAY, MAY 8

  Some thirty-six hours after Tim Bosma went missing, Staff Sergeant Matt Kavanagh of the Hamilton Police gave the first of many media briefings that would be held in this investigation. Those news briefings, along with social media, were how people got their information about the case. Over the course of the next week, Kavanagh would become a familiar figure to those following Bosma’s disappearance. Tens of thousands of viewers went online to watch live-streamed press conferences for updates and then turned to social media to discuss the developments.

  In his mid-fifties, stocky, with wire-framed glasses and short-cropped, slightly receding grey hair, Kavanagh looks exactly like what he is: a cop with an Irish name in a blue-collar town. If you didn’t immediately guess he was a homicide detective, you might pick gym teacher as his profession, and you’d be half right. For the more than three decades he’s been with the Hamilton Police, he’s also volunteered as a football coach for high school kids from tough neighbourhoods.

  While Kavanagh sometimes pulls a “strict dad” act with reporters—correcting them if they get their facts wrong or repeat a question someone has already asked—he also returns phone calls and tells the press what he can, within the limits of an investigation. He occasionally lapses into cop jargon, like “attending the residence” and “interviewing the complainant,” but at the same time he gives out the kind of colourful anecdotes that make a story come alive. He’s happy to reveal, for example, that when the p
olice need to have an iPhone unlocked for a murder case, an officer will take it on a plane to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. If it’s a lesser crime and not such a big deal if the phone goes missing, they’ll just send it by commercial courier.

  When Kavanagh arrived at the first of the Bosma briefings (most of which can still be seen on YouTube), he apologized for being late to the handful of local reporters present and then read from a prepared statement written in standard police vernacular. “This is regarding the missing person Timothy Bosma. On April 28, 2013, Timothy Bosma posted his 2007 Dodge Ram pickup truck for sale on two different websites. On Monday, May 6, a male party arranged by telephone to view the truck at Mr. Bosma’s residence in Ancaster. At approximately 9:20 P.M., Mr. Bosma went for a test drive with two young males in this pickup truck. Mr. Bosma had told his spouse that the males stated they were from Toronto. Mr. Bosma has not been seen or heard from since this time.”

  Kavanagh provided a description of the two men in question. The one who drove the truck was white, in his mid-twenties, six foot one or two, 170 to 180 pounds. He had light to medium short brown hair and was unshaven. He wore blue jeans, a long-sleeved orange shirt, and running shoes. The second male, the one who sat in the back, was also white, in his early to mid-twenties, five foot nine or ten, small to medium build. He was wearing a red hooded sweatshirt, with the hood up mostly covering his dark hair.

  The homicide unit had taken over the investigation due to what Kavanagh called “the unusual nature of the disappearance.” He asked anyone with information to contact the police, and then he took questions from reporters. Like almost everyone else in town, the press had been reading about Tim Bosma’s disappearance on Facebook and had heard about the third man, who had supposedly dropped the other two off.

  “Is there any information about him?” a reporter asked.

  Kavanagh seemed taken aback. “I’m not sure where you are getting that from,” he said.

  “Social media,” answered the reporter.

  Kavanagh said that while it was possible more people were involved, all the police had at the moment was the description of the two suspects he had provided. Sharlene Bosma had not seen any other vehicle.

  “Are we to assume the suspects are back in Toronto?”

  “No, we’re not. The information that we had from Mr. Bosma—he relayed to his spouse that they were from the Toronto area—I can’t confirm that either way, if they were from there or not.”

  A reporter raised the issue of why one of the city’s top homicide detectives was giving a press conference about a missing persons case. “What is Hamilton Police’s policy for getting the homicide squad involved?” she wanted to know.

  “As I already said at the beginning of this media release, if it is an unusual missing person, then we are to be involved. And this had unusual circumstances right from the onset, so we got involved yesterday, last night.”

  Despite getting one of Kavanagh’s trademark you’re-not-listening-to-me answers, the reporter wouldn’t drop the issue. “So is this a missing persons case or a murder investigation?” she asked a minute or two later.

  “This is a missing persons investigation with unusual circumstances,” Kavanagh said. “I think I’ve already spoken about that.”

  He had, but to be fair to the journalist, her persistent questioning reflected the widespread misconception that an adult has to be missing for twenty-four to forty-eight hours before police will take action. While this was definitely true to a greater extent in the past, current policies encourage police to assess each missing persons case individually and act accordingly.

  As a result, the day after Tim Bosma went missing, Hamilton Police immediately had their search-and-rescue team and a canine unit conduct a ground search. They were assisted by officers of the Ontario Provincial Police, as they were looking not just in the area of Ancaster, where the Bosmas lived, but also westward to the small city of Brantford. The missing pickup truck was red-flagged at the border and an alert was sent out to all police agencies as well as the media. Although the truck had been advertised on both auto​TRADER.​ca and Kijiji, Kavanagh said there was no email path to follow or computer analysis to be done, as all contact with the prospective buyers had been by phone.

  “Did he have his phone with him at the time of the disappearance?” asked a reporter.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Were you able to trace that, or did he make any calls from it?”

  “It’s been turned off. But yes, we have some data from it.”

  “What time was his cell phone turned off?”

  “I’m not going to say that, but it was turned off.”

  As the news conference—which lasted just eight minutes—drew to a close, Kavanagh was asked what advice, if any, he had for people trying to sell a truck online and whether it was a dangerous thing to do.

  Use common sense, he warned. Don’t give out your home address. Meet somewhere in the middle of the day, not a rural location. “Obviously, these males, in the evidence we have so far, they were targeting a certain type of vehicle, and it was a Dodge Ram 3500, so if [anyone has] that type of vehicle for sale, they are to beware.”

  “So this truck, you think, was the target, not Bosma specifically?”

  “That’s correct,” said Kavanagh, answering for the first time a question that would arise repeatedly during the course of the investigation and the trial.

  —

  AT THE BOSMA HOUSE, family and a crowd of friends had gathered to conduct a search for Tim. He and Sharlene were part of the Ancaster Christian Reformed Church, an institution whose members are predominantly of Dutch background and share a strong sense of community. Three years earlier, when Sharlene was pregnant and she and Tim were living in a trailer on the property, many of those same people had pitched in to help build their house. Now, even acquaintances who hadn’t seen Bosma in years were joining the search parties out scouring roadside ditches and nearby fields. There were so many people looking that police became worried evidence might be disrupted or even destroyed and had to ask the volunteers to stop searching.

  At that point, they returned to the Bosmas’ garage, which had become a kind of informal command centre, and focused their attention on other projects. They set up a Find Tim Bosma page on Facebook and printed up Missing posters showing Bosma and his truck, and began plastering them throughout the region, everywhere from Toronto, where the test drivers supposedly lived, to Brantford, where police believed they had headed. The posters went up on lampposts, windshields, anywhere anyone could put them. Within days, they were as widespread as the Facebook posts calling for Tim’s return.

  As more and more people learned of Bosma’s strange disappearance, it was inevitable that rumours would begin circulating, both online and off. There was talk that Bosma must have been connected to his abductors, otherwise why go off in the night with two strangers who had arrived on foot? By way of explanation, the usual theories and wild speculation cropped up. There were drugs involved. It was organized crime. Bosma was, after all, in construction, and “we all know what that means.” He and Sharlene had an awfully big home for such a young couple—maybe they had taken on too much debt. The whole situation just didn’t add up. Why would anyone steal a truck that way? If you want to steal a truck, you take it with no one in it. Or if it’s a carjacking, you leave the driver by the road. Nothing about this crime made any sense.

  DAY 4—THURSDAY, MAY 9

  On Thursday, Sharlene Bosma made an appeal to the public for information. Flanked by her mother, father, Tim’s parents and his brother-in-law, she took her place in front of the microphones in the same briefing room at Hamilton Police headquarters where Detective Kavanagh had appeared the day before. She was, as anyone in her situation would be, extremely distressed. Yet on another level she was extraordinarily composed. And although she was sleep deprived, wore no makeup, and had her dark hair pulled back, she was still beautiful in the glare of the televisi
on lights. Her speech was the type of broadcast moment that makes people stop whatever they are doing to look at the television or turn up the radio. It transformed the disappearance of Tim Bosma from a quirky missing persons case into a major crime story.

  With her voice shaking, Sharlene introduced herself and described Tim as her husband, partner, best friend, love of her life, and father of her two-year-old daughter. She acknowledged what everybody had been thinking since news of her husband’s disappearance broke. “This does not feel like real life,” she said. “This only happens on TV and in movies.”

  She looked down at her notes and then back up at the assembled media as she recounted her version of events, or as much of it as the police would allow. “As you know,” Sharlene said, “I watched my husband drive away just after nine o’clock Monday night. He smiled at me and said he’d be right back. And I have not seen him since. You are all aware that I saw the two men who took my husband. You have already been provided a description of these two individuals. I ask you if you see anyone that closely matches this description of these men to please call the police. You’ve seen pictures of Tim and his truck. Please, please, if you see Tim or the truck, contact the police.”