Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  As the trial’s first witness, she will be questioned by Tony Leitch, who leads the team of three prosecutors handling this case. Leitch is a bearlike ex–football player who gives off an everyman vibe. He gets things underway with a series of personal questions, the first of which is, “Sharlene, how did you meet Tim?”

  Online in November 2008, she answers. Their first date was “disastrous,” but things got better fast. They married on February 13, 2010. Their daughter, who wasn’t planned, arrived less than a year later. They wanted to have three children and adopt one. She hoped for a natural birth after having had a Caesarean. Three months before Tim disappeared, the couple had gone to a fertility clinic.

  “What can you tell me about his character?”

  “Very strong,” says Sharlene, “and the patience of a saint because he was married to me.”

  Leitch inquires about bad habits, and Sharlene answers that her husband had quit smoking, something she had not managed.

  “Gambling?” asks Leitch.

  “Just poker night with the boys.”

  “What about drug use? Did he use drugs?”

  “No.”

  “What about alcohol?”

  “He liked his beer. He definitely had the occasional ‘night,’ but he didn’t have a drinking problem.”

  “How was the state of your marriage?”

  “We were in a good place,” she says. “Our biggest issue was the truck, which kept breaking down, and it was costing a fortune to fix it all the time.”

  As he elicits more information about the black Dodge Ram, Leitch shows pictures of it on the video monitors set up in the courtroom. “I know you’re not a big car person,” he says to Sharlene, “but what do you know about the rims?”

  “That they were all the same?” she answers quizzically, to the amusement of the courtroom gallery. It’s one of several occasions when Sharlene will make people laugh. And like the punkish red highlights in her hair, it is an indication that she refuses to be typecast in the role of grieving widow. Although she has encountered what she described at her husband’s memorial service as “the vilest form of evil,” Sharlene can still laugh and make others laugh along with her. What happened to her husband may have changed her and her daughter’s lives forever, but it seems she will not let it define them. She will not be reduced to the woman in the YouTube video. Nor will she allow Tim’s daughter to become the girl whose father was murdered. Although the little girl’s baby pictures have been shared all over the internet, neither Sharlene nor anyone else in the Bosma family has ever said her name in public. It has remained private.

  When Leitch puts one of the Missing posters up on the courtroom screens, Sharlene tears up as she explains that Tim is smiling because he is holding his newborn nephew for the very first time. It is a difficult moment in her testimony, but not the worst. That comes when Leitch asks about how Tim was behaving before the test drive. Sharlene describes him pacing back and forth in front of the hockey game on TV. He was talking about how it was getting dark out and that it made no sense to come to see a truck so late. He got his daughter into her pyjamas and cuddled with her on the couch before Sharlene took her off to bed. When Sharlene came back downstairs, Tim asked her if he should go on the test drive, given the time of night. “Yes, you should,” she said, “because we want the truck to come back.”

  As she tells her story to the packed courtroom, Sharlene is choking back sobs. That detail, which has never before been revealed in public, will make headlines, lead the newscasts, and be scrutinized in discussions online and off. Yet Sharlene has clearly prepared for its impact and quickly regains her composure as Leitch presses ahead to what happened when the men from Toronto arrived at her house.

  Sharlene tells the prosecutor that she and her tenant, Wayne De Boer, had been out in the garage having a cigarette. It was part of a pact they had made with each other to stop smoking. Until they could give up their habit completely, they would each have one cigarette together in the evening. As they were chatting and puffing away, Sharlene heard her husband’s cell phone ring and Tim answer it. At the same time, she and Wayne heard voices and footsteps. When they looked out the open garage door, they saw two men about halfway up the driveway, approaching them in the dusk. The taller one, who Sharlene refers to as “Cell Phone Guy,” was talking on his phone. When Tim came from the house into the garage, he spotted the two men and ended his call. Wayne, who will testify after Sharlene and is an articulate witness with an eye for detail, remembers hearing the distinctive sound of the visitor’s flip phone clicking shut as he put it in his front jeans pocket. The only thing Wayne can’t recall is if it was the left or right pocket.

  No one saw or heard any kind of vehicle. Sharlene says Tim joked to the visitors that they didn’t have to park in the road, that they could have left their car in the driveway. Cell Phone Guy said they had no car. A friend had dropped them off and gone to the Tim Hortons at Duff’s Corners to grab a bite to eat, he explained, as he gestured to the northeast.

  As Tim introduced himself and made small talk, Sharlene stepped back. “I didn’t want to interfere,” she tells the court. “It was Tim’s truck, and I let him handle it.” Leitch asks if she heard any names, if there was any physical contact. “Perhaps a handshake, but I don’t remember anymore,” she says.

  The entire encounter was very brief. It was barely a minute before Tim pulled his truck out of the garage for the men to inspect. Both Wayne and Sharlene remember the shorter guy hanging back. His red hoodie partially hid his face and he kept his hands in the kangaroo-pouch pocket. “He seemed sketchy,” Sharlene says. “He wouldn’t look at us.” After the men did a very brief inspection of the truck, they got in with Tim and started slowly down the driveway. It seemed to Sharlene as if they were testing the brakes.

  As they drove off, she turned to Wayne and said, “That was weird.”

  To defuse the situation, Wayne indulged in a bit of black humour. “I said to Sharlene, ‘That might be the last time we see Tim,’ ” he testifies.

  The extremeness of the joke cut the tension, and soon after, the smokers headed back inside. Wayne went to his apartment in the basement, where he turned on the hockey game, while Sharlene checked on her daughter and then watched a TV show she’d recorded, the kind Tim wouldn’t want to see. When the program finished, she noticed the PVR clock said 10:20 and became alarmed.

  She called Tim, but it went to voice mail. Instead of leaving a message, she sent a text asking, “Where are you?” Then she texted Wayne and told him they were going to have to break their only-one-cigarette-a-night pact. They met in the garage and decided that Wayne should head to the Tim Hortons where the visitors’ friend was supposed to be. When Wayne didn’t see either the men or Tim’s truck there, he drove to some nearby big-box stores with a well-lit parking lot, figuring that they might have wanted to take a closer look at the truck under bright lights. But the men weren’t there either, so he returned to the house.

  Sharlene had been speaking to Jesse, a friend who had stopped by earlier in the evening and helped Tim do some paint touchups on the truck and clear out his tools from its back box. She thought her husband might have gone over to Jesse’s to have a beer and celebrate the truck’s sale, but Jesse hadn’t seen him. As a next step, Sharlene arranged to meet Jesse’s girlfriend, Stephanie, at the Brassie Pub in Ancaster. She tells the court she was hoping Tim had taken the two men there to seal the deal, as in “I’ll buy you beer if you buy my truck.”

  Up to that point, Sharlene had resisted calling the police, worried that her husband would come home and accuse her of being an “overreacting paranoid wife who just freaks out because Tim’s going to be late,” but Wayne convinced her to call and start the process immediately. He had spoken to his mother, who worked in a civilian capacity at a nearby police force. She told him that if a person’s disappearance was out of character, there was no need to wait twenty-four hours before contacting police.

  Wayne then sta
yed with the Bosmas’ little girl while Sharlene headed to the Brassie, calling 911 on her way. The operator told her police officers would meet her at the pub. While she and Stephanie were waiting, they checked to see if there had been any activity on Tim’s bank account and credit card. They even signed into his 407 Express Toll Route account on the off chance they could see if he had been on the highway. When the police arrived they talked to Sharlene and then accompanied her home. She called her mother to let her know what was going on. She also tried her husband’s phone a few more times.

  —

  AS THE CROWN’S FIRST WITNESS, Sharlene Bosma was excluded from observing almost all of the pretrial proceedings, including Craig Fraser’s opening address. But now that her testimony is finally done, she is free to join her family and friends, who occupy three reserved rows at the centre front of the courtroom. They are directly behind the so-called “bar”—which separates the public gallery from the participants in the trial. Several times a day, the two accused men, who are not handcuffed but have special soft shackles around their ankles, shuffle directly in front of the Bosmas.

  Millard and Smich sit at opposite ends of the last table on the defence side of the courtroom. Their shackled feet are hidden behind a pile of boxes placed specially to obstruct jurors’ line of sight. They occasionally take notes.

  Directly in front of the defendants are Smich’s lawyer, Thomas Dungey, and his co-counsel, Jennifer Trehearne. In front of them and just below Justice Andrew Goodman sit Ravin Pillay, Millard’s lawyer, and his co-counsel, Nadir Sachak. On the other side of the aisle are the assistant Crown attorneys: Tony Leitch, Craig Fraser, and the most junior of the three, Brett Moodie.

  With ninety witnesses and four months of trial still to come, the jurors and courtroom regulars will get to know the main players well. Dungey is a shaven-headed septuagenarian with a flair for dramatic cross-examinations. Pillay, always quick to rise with an objection, is soft-spoken and detail-oriented. Sachak is the self-proclaimed Toronto city slicker who likes to chat up witnesses before moving in for the kill. And Trehearne is the legal whiz, whose work on the case revolves around complex motions as opposed to cross-examination.

  Leitch is the lead prosecutor who should not be underestimated. Fraser is his trusted right-hand man. And Moodie is the junior on the team.

  The judge will not play a major role in this story. His most important rulings involve the admissibility of evidence and cannot be made public until the end of Millard’s and Smich’s trial for the murder of Laura Babcock, which is not scheduled to take place until 2017. In the meantime, all that’s reportable is an occasional comment.

  The jury of eight women and six men are largely inscrutable. It’s rare that they give a clue about what they are thinking.

  —

  AMONG THE DOZENS OF police officers who will testify at trial, one of the first is Detective Constable John Tselepakis, who was working the 4 P.M. to 4 A.M. shift at the Hamilton Police’s Mountain Division when the missing person report for Tim Bosma came in. He was told that Bosma’s wife was frantic and believed harm had been done to her husband. At 1:34 A.M. on May 7, Tselepakis sent what is known as a humanitarian or emergency request to corporate security at Bell Canada, Bosma’s cell phone provider. Less than ten minutes later, at 1:43, Bell provided Tselepakis with an account of the activity on Tim Bosma’s smartphone from 7 P.M. on Monday, May 6, to 1 A.M. on Tuesday, May 7. The number Tim had been called from shortly after 7 P.M., and then again just after 9 P.M., was 647-303-2279, a Toronto area code. The last two pings from Tim’s cell phone came off a tower in the east end of Brantford on Monday night.

  Tselepakis then contacted Wind, the service provider for the 647 number. The information he got back showed that the number was registered to a Lucas Bate. Like Bell, Wind provided a list of phone numbers called, as well as cell tower locations pinged by the phone. With a little bit of Googling, Tselepakis quickly linked one of the numbers called by the Bate phone to a Kijiji ad for another Dodge Ram truck. By 8:30 A.M., there were already a number of leads to follow up on. Detective Kavanagh sent Sergeant Greg Jackson, a member of the homicide unit, to assist the Mountain Division.

  Jackson called the number Tselepakis had found was associated with the Kijiji ad and reached Igor Tumanenko, the owner of the other Dodge Ram truck for sale. Tumanenko appeared to have valuable information, but because of his heavy accent it was difficult to get the details straight on the phone. Jackson made arrangements to visit Tumanenko’s workplace in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke that afternoon. He was accompanied by Sergeant Greg Rodzoniak, who would later become the primary detective on the Bosma investigation while Jackson eventually assumed the role of file manager in charge of all the documentation. Sitting atop this so-called investigative triangle was Detective Kavanagh, whose official title was major case manager and whose job it was to steer the investigation and oversee staffing and resources.

  —

  ALTHOUGH KAVANAGH HAD TOLD the press early on that the man who went for the first test drive was a very large individual who could easily have overpowered the suspects, Tumanenko’s name was never made public. As a result, armchair detectives had no way to look him up online to decide if he really was as massive as the police had made out (and dig into every other aspect of his life). Instead, they had to content themselves with endless discussion about how the man they had nicknamed RBEG—short for Really Big Etobicoke Guy—had managed to escape the fate that met Tim Bosma. This involved much wild speculation about Tasers, chloroform, knives, and adipose tissue. Later, when it was revealed that a gun was involved—against which it would have been difficult for any potential victim to defend themselves—a grisly theory was floated on Websleuths that RBEG might have survived simply because he was too big to fit into Millard’s incinerator without requiring dismemberment.

  When Tumanenko is called as a witness during the first week of trial, the mystery is finally solved. He is indeed a big man, just over six foot, and in good shape, his shoulders heavily muscled under the long-sleeved grey T-shirt he wears with jeans and trainers. Despite his size, he moves quickly and lightly across the courtroom. He gives the impression of being in control, and as the court is about to learn, he is not shy about speaking his mind. He was “pissed off,” he says, when the test drivers arrived late and messed up his Sunday afternoon plans. Contrary to the initial police reports, the men did not walk up to his workplace but to his apartment building in the north end of Toronto.

  He was surprised that they didn’t have a car but not concerned. They all shook hands. Tumanenko thinks the taller man introduced himself as Evan, which is Dellen Millard’s middle name. He wore a “man bag,” which Tumanenko describes as a cross between an Indiana Jones–style satchel and a smaller purse like the one carried by Zach Galifianakis’s character in The Hangover. Despite being a Russian émigré who arrived in Canada via Israel, Tumanenko has an impressive grasp of Hollywood movie trivia along with an eye for detail. He tells the court it was the taller man who asked about his truck, saying he wanted to use it to tow race cars to Calgary.

  It was also the taller guy who eventually got into the driver’s seat, but not immediately. Tumanenko had planned the test drive to make the best possible sales pitch, and it began with him driving his potential customers through city streets. He turned the wheel over to the taller man just before they got on Highway 407, a toll route. When asked by prosecutor Brett Moodie why he chose that route, given the cost, Tumanenko said he wasn’t one to worry about five or six dollars when selling a $32,000 truck. He figured any serious prospective buyer would want to try it out at 100 or 120 kilometres an hour.

  While out on the highway, the men’s conversation turned to the advantages of diesel engines. Tumanenko mentioned he had worked on Cummins engines, like the one in his truck, when he was in the Israeli army. All of a sudden, the shorter guy in the back seat—who, Tumanenko said, had been “almost invisible” and “quiet as a fish”—perked up.

/>   “He asks me, ‘What did you do in Israeli army?’ ” says Tumanenko, who, like many native Russian speakers, drops his articles in English. “I look at him and I tell him, ‘You don’t want to know what I did there.’ ” At that point, Tumanenko tells the court, the driver turned his head and gave the guy in the back a sharp look. He moved so fast, Tumanenko wondered if the man might have pulled a muscle in his neck.

  Despite his heavy accent and occasional grammatical failings, Tumanenko is a raconteur with a way with words. His revelation about the Israeli army, he says, caused “a change of temperature, dynamic, inside of car.” It also caused Tumanenko some anxiety, he testifies, because at the moment the driver looked back at his friend, he was doing 50 to 60 kilometres an hour on an exit ramp.

  This is something Nadir Sachak, one of Millard’s lawyers, picks up on during cross-examination when he asks Tumanenko to estimate how long the backward glance was.

  “It was long enough for me,” Tumanenko answers. “One second, two second, when you’re driving sixty, you cannot look in the back.”

  “Did you say, ‘Buddy, what are you doing?’ ”

  “No. It was not so bad for me to start screaming ‘Pay attention to the road,’ but it was there.”

  “You want to describe it as a big deal, but it was not a big deal,” says Sachak, who has been becoming steadily more aggressive with the witness. At one point things get so heated that Tumanenko snaps at Sachak, “Don’t tell me what I don’t know. I just told you exactly what happened.” The judge has to intervene to set him straight on what he no doubt finds to be the curious customs of Canadian courtrooms, where the witness does not get to interrupt the lawyer, no matter how much he dislikes the questions.

  Sachak requests that Tumanenko look over his police statement, made two days after the test drive. “You were being honest?” he asks.

  “Yes.”