Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  “You’re talking the victim?” responded Kavanagh, as if to make sure he’d heard her correctly.

  “Yes.”

  “No, he does not,” said Kavanagh, who would have to deal with several more versions of this question, as well as the oft-repeated query of whether Tim Bosma was connected to Dellen Millard, to which he unequivocally answered, “There’s no connection whatsoever.”

  As far as motive went, Kavanagh stated simply that he wished he knew and that he believed Bosma had been “targeted.” Although he didn’t specify, as he had at an earlier news conference, that this targeting related to the truck, it was the only inference that made sense.

  A reporter asked if the first-degree murder charge meant police believed Millard had planned on killing Tim Bosma from the moment of their encounter at 9 P.M. on Monday night. Kavanagh explained that under the Criminal Code, if a victim is forcibly confined and then murdered, the charge is automatically murder in the first degree. He said that because Tim had entered his truck by his own free will but not been allowed to leave, forcible confinement was the proper charge.

  Asked about other suspects, Kavanagh revealed that video evidence recovered by police showed a second vehicle following the black Dodge Ram as it left the Bosma residence. “We do not know at this time how many people were in that second vehicle, so right now we’re looking for at least three, possibly more.”

  “Can you describe the second vehicle, the following vehicle?”

  “We’ve had a lot of people from the different auto squads—different services we have—look at the video for us, and we can’t identify it,” Kavanagh said. “It looks like an SUV-type vehicle, but I don’t want to be wrong about that. I’m relying on other officers to identify that vehicle for me, and that’s what they give me today.”

  “Any indication that the second vehicle was spotted in the area of the Etobicoke incident the day before? Have you guys gone through footage from that industrial area?”

  “Yes, we have. We’ve gone at length through the surveillance there, and no other vehicle was seen at that location.”

  A question or two later, Andrew Michalski came up. He had caught the eye of reporters as well as amateur sleuths. Kavanagh was asked to talk about his involvement, if any.

  “Andrew had been identified; he’s been interviewed; he’s been cleared of having involvement.”

  So too had Dellen Millard’s mother. “Mrs. Burns has absolutely no involvement or knowledge of this case,” Kavanagh stated emphatically, when asked about the trailer in her driveway.

  On the subject of how Tim Bosma had died, Kavanagh was at his least forthcoming, repeatedly stating that he could not discuss evidence that would eventually be before the court. Pretty much the only thing he would say was that police believed the victim died the night of the test drive. He declined to answer any questions about the incinerator, photos of which were now circulating on the internet.

  As the news conference wrapped up, Kavanagh said that 120 officers were still working on the case, including one specially assigned to monitor social media. The public had provided a lot of tips, and police were still counting on them. “These people talk,” Kavanagh said of the suspects. “They talk to other people, and we need these people to call the tip line and supply information to identify the other people involved in this crime.” He guaranteed that the second suspect would be arrested.

  When asked about having to break the news of Tim’s death to the Bosma family, Kavanagh replied that, as the leader of the team, it had fallen to him to do that most difficult of jobs. “I’m sorry for the Bosma family,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re experiencing right now.”

  DAY 10—WEDNESDAY, MAY 15

  Millard’s appearance at downtown Hamilton’s John Sopinka Courthouse was brief. He was charged with first-degree murder, forcible confinement, and motor vehicle theft, and was asked to indicate that he understood the charges against him. The whole procedure lasted only a few minutes and was covered by a temporary court-ordered publication ban. The purpose of the ban, which is standard practice in Canadian courts, is to protect the fairness and integrity of the case and prevent the public dissemination of information or evidence that might jeopardize the trial process. In this case, for example, the ban prevented the press from reporting the names of a long list of people who were considered potential witnesses and with whom Millard had been ordered to have no contact.

  Although three sketch artists were present in court, none of them managed to capture a decent likeness of Millard. He was unshaven and unemotional, wore a wrinkled white shirt and beige pants, and, in contrast to his mohawk days, had a subdued hairstyle with short back and sides. After the brief hearing, the accused was sent back to the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, better known to locals as the notorious Barton Street jail. Its reputation is due to frequent reports of overcrowding, drug-overdose deaths, lockdowns, and various other unsavoury goings-on.

  Millard’s original lawyer, Deepak Paradkar, met with the press on the courthouse steps, which in Hamilton are nothing like the long, photogenic stairways leading up to historic court buildings so often seen on the news. There are just five dusty steps on Main Street, where noisy traffic speeds by. Even when reporters were pressed up close to Paradkar, with their microphones and tape recorders inches from his face, the passing trucks sometimes made it difficult to hear.

  This appearance was, to put it mildly, out of the ordinary in normally tight-lipped Toronto lawyer circles. But Paradkar sees himself as more of an American-style lawyer along the lines of F. Lee Bailey and the late Johnnie Cochran, so he was happy to court the press. “I take my cues in trial preparation from the United States, and I think Canadian lawyers generally are not up to speed,” he would later tell The Hamilton Spectator, in an interview that gave rise to a lot of tsk-tsking.

  In keeping with those role models, Paradkar talked to the media regularly, from the moment it became known he was Dellen Millard’s lawyer until he later left the case for reasons that have never been made public. First, he let it be known that his client would be pleading not guilty and was innocent until proven guilty before the law. Then he set about drumming home his storyline. If the dominant narrative was that this was a senseless crime about a truck, Paradkar’s counter narrative was that his client didn’t need to steal a truck and that his finances were fine. “He is not in debt. He owns a number of properties that are paid for,” he told reporters. “Police have confirmed that he had sufficient funds to easily purchase this truck had he wished to.”

  Paradkar was also out to polish Millard’s image as best he could. In an interview given to the CBC shortly after Millard’s arrest, Paradkar said of his client, “He’s a very unassuming, humble person. He’s intelligent, well-educated, and financially well off, so there’s no motive here.” On the courthouse steps, he described Millard as “a bit of a philosopher by way of nature and background and reading,” and said he was taking things one step at a time.

  Asked the thorny question of whether Millard was cooperating with police, Paradkar answered that his client was exercising his constitutional right to remain silent. “The police have their information. They’ve been doing their investigation. They have their leads, so we’re leaving it to the police.”

  To the surprise of reporters hungry to learn more about this mysterious crime, Paradkar didn’t stop there. He went on to do something truly gasp-worthy by suggesting that Dellen Millard might have been framed. “There is a story behind this which I can’t get into,” he said. “Obviously, it’s more than it appears to be.” When pressed for details, he answered, “I can’t get into the framing aspect. We’re really waiting for the police investigation to be completed. There are other suspects out there…and once they’ve been apprehended, I think you’ll have a fuller picture of what’s going on.”

  The reactions to his statements were like the results of a Rorschach test as well as a harbinger of countless discussions to come. The idea that the
re must be something bigger going on, like a frame-up, provided a certain level of comfort to those who didn’t want to believe that a thirty-two-year-old father had been killed simply for his truck. Or that another young man, who had been given all the advantages in life, could be capable of such evil.

  For many people, a shadowy gang of yet-to-be-identified villains was an explanation somehow preferable to a real-life psychopath who preyed upon anyone placing an online ad. Even a far-fetched reason for Tim Bosma’s death was better than no reason at all.

  FOUR

  FORENSICS

  At the request of Hamilton Police, officers from the Halton Regional force conducted the forensic examination of Tim Bosma’s truck and the trailer used to transport it. But when the team arrived at Metro Truck, where the trailer had been stored, they were not impressed with the location. The mechanics there had pulled out their cell phones and begun snapping pictures as soon as they realized they had a real-life CSI team in their midst, dusting the trailer for fingerprints and trying to get tire impressions. It was quickly arranged for the trailer to be transported to a secure Ontario Provincial Police facility in Tillsonburg, 110 kilometres to the southwest.

  Constable Laura Trowbridge of the Hamilton Police was assigned to follow the trailer to Tillsonburg. All was going smoothly until shortly after 6 P.M., when she was on the 403 headed west to Brantford. As she approached the Golf Links overpass in Ancaster, the rear doors of the trailer flew open in heavy rush-hour traffic. A green-and-brown cardboard box that looked like a fruit box “sort of lifted into the air. It kind of floated out of the trailer,” Trowbridge tells the court. “I assumed it was empty. It landed on the roadway toward the right side of the front of my car.” She ran it over. As far as she observed, nothing else fell out.

  Trowbridge, who was in an unmarked vehicle, started honking her horn at the tow truck driver, but he didn’t hear her. Eventually, she got into the fast lane and directed him to pull over. The whole incident took place over a stretch of about two kilometres and lasted three minutes.

  “Did you see how it opened up?” prosecutor Brett Moodie asks her.

  “The lock wasn’t actually securing the doors closed,” Trowbridge says. Despite all the officers who had looked at the trailer, which was a key piece of evidence in a very major case, no one had noticed this. After the incident, Trowbridge and the driver had to wire the doors shut with supplies he found in his truck. While she and the trailer proceeded to Tillsonburg, Trowbridge requested that another officer come out and check for the box that had fallen out.

  The rest of the ride passed without incident, and by 8 P.M. Trowbridge had left the trailer in the secure facility. Back at Hamilton Police headquarters, she was shown the box recovered by a fellow officer—it was small and white, not at all like what she had seen. Trowbridge headed out to where the incident happened and found the green-and-brown box, seized it, and took it back to the police station.

  On cross-examination, Millard’s lawyer, Ravin Pillay, tries, as criminal defence lawyers invariably do, to make the most of this screw-up.

  “It was your job, essentially, to ensure the trailer got from Point A to the Tillsonburg detachment.”

  Trowbridge agrees that it was.

  “You didn’t take steps to ensure the doors to the trailer were closed, locked,” says Pillay. “Do you know if anyone else took steps to ensure the doors were locked?”

  She doesn’t.

  “It was a scene you needed to protect,” he says. “This was a shock to you?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Trowbridge says, but she was travelling about 110 kilometres an hour, so it would have been unsafe to do anything but keep going.

  At some point, says Pillay, she had to take her eyes off the rear of the trailer to get the tow truck to pull over. “You don’t know if anything else came out?” he asks.

  Trowbridge says she doesn’t think anything did. She had seen a green tarp in the trailer when the doors opened, and it was still inside after they stopped by the side of the road. It was being blown about, but it didn’t drag on the ground or fall out of the trailer.

  —

  WHEN THE REAR DOORS of the trailer were opened in Tillsonburg on Wednesday, May 15, the same day Dellen Millard was charged with murder, police officers immediately saw the green tarp covering the frame of a burned-out front seat from a truck. Tim Bosma’s truck was behind it, toward the front of the trailer.

  Over the next three days, seven police officers and two forensic biologists would conduct an exhaustive search for evidence on the truck, the trailer, and everything within it. Hamilton Police had asked for assistance from neighbouring forces, so this was a multijurisdictional team. In charge of the identification work was Sergeant David Banks of the Halton Regional Police. His colleague Detective Constable Laura McLellan acted as the main photographer. Describing their approach to the jury, McLellan says, “We take a deep breath, look at what we have, and then make the plan.”

  They began by removing the seat frame and inspecting it for blood, but because it had been set on fire, there was nothing to be found beyond a corn husk stuck in a corner. Working inside the trailer, McLellan photographed the truck’s exterior, including areas where it had been sanded down after the removal of its Dodge Ram and dealership emblems. The missing emblems were in the truck bed, along with the truck’s headlights, tail lights, side trim, and front grille, as well as three more tarps, a roll of paper towels, and other miscellaneous items. Everything was removed, photographed, and inspected for blood and bodily fluids.

  Sergeant Robert Jones, a blood-spatter expert with the Waterloo Regional Police, found multiple stains on the tarps, including one spatter stain that he said would have been created by some kind of force. He also detected signs of an attempted “cleanup” on the tarp, but, as he will tell the jury many times, removing blood is not as easy as it might seem. “You really have to scrub,” he says.

  To extract the truck from the trailer, the forensics team had a key cut so that Banks could lean in and straighten the truck’s front wheels and have it pulled out onto a flatbed from which it was lowered to the floor. Because it had no front seats and the officers needed to preserve “the scene,” they didn’t have the option of driving it out. Once the truck was out, McLellan photographed everything they had been unable to see or access inside the trailer, including the interior of the Dodge Ram. The truck’s windows were all rolled down except for the front passenger’s window, which was partially up and broken. The glass was removed and came out intact. It was stabilized and wrapped.

  With the naked eye, and then wearing orange goggles to search using a laser, the forensics officers looked for blood, finding dark-red and reddish-brown staining on the dashboard, cup holders, driver’s visor, seat belts, and doors, among other places. But before they began their presumptive blood testing, the team attempted to collect gunshot residue, or GSR, which is both invisible and easy to disrupt and can therefore quickly disappear. They used a sticky dabber to lift any GSR that was present from the truck’s ceiling and doors to determine whether a gun had been fired inside the vehicle.

  It’s impossible to test all blood from a crime scene, so the investigators selected the stains they felt would provide the most useful information. The police marked the stains they were most interested in with white circles, while the biologists from the Centre of Forensic Sciences used a distinctive gold marker. When their swabs showed a positive result for molecules associated with blood, the investigators added plus signs. Because the stripping of the interior indicated a cleanup, they especially sought out areas that the cleaners might have overlooked, including holes in the truck’s floor, where they located significant stains.

  Robert Jones, who began specializing in bloodstain pattern analysis in 2004, tells the jury that bloodstain patterns are predictable and reproducible. As a result, he and many other specialists in the field keep their own blood-spatter rooms to test out and verify their theories. He uses sheep’s blood, wh
ich is disease free and acts in the same manner as human blood. Among the patterns he looks for are passive (blood drops), transfer (from a source to another surface), and spatter (blood dispersed by some sort of force).

  On the undercarriage of Tim Bosma’s truck, which was hoisted up so that investigators could get a better look, Jones discovered spatter stains, altered stains, and flow stains. Among the more than one hundred photos he includes in his presentation to the court, Jones shows pictures where forensics officers have circled in white dozens of small bloodstains on the rear wheel well and tailpipe. On photos of the back passenger step rail, he points out circular spatter stains on the chrome, as well as flow stains. “It would appear that there’s been some kind of dilution effect,” Jones tells the jury. “That could come from water flow from cleaning.” While he can’t say for sure what caused the stains on the undercarriage, they are consistent with water from a power washer or a hose hitting blood.

  According to Jones, the blood source had to be below the step, which is forty-two centimetres off the ground, and somewhere in the area of the passenger door. His theory is that someone took a hose or power washer to a pool of blood on the ground, causing it to splash up underneath the truck. The hundreds of spatter spots indicated that the attempted cleanup was likely followed by a drive.

  The bloodstains on the truck’s interior provided less information as to what might have happened to cause what Jones calls a bloodletting event. Due to the stripped seats and carpeting, there were few patterns to work from. “I’m missing things that would give me an idea of what the mechanism was that created those stains,” Jones says. “I’m missing too much inside the vehicle to say how big the event was.”