Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  All he can say is that the bloodletting event is consistent with a shooting and that the altered bloodstains inside the vehicle indicate another cleanup, which probably used water. One of his key sources of information was the glove box interior, where Jones found unaltered stains that had escaped cleanup. These small spatter stains, which likely went in through the one- to two-millimetre gap between the glove box door and the dash, “could be associated with a mist,” a pattern typically caused by what Jones calls a high-energy source like a shooting. “What that would tell me is the source of blood had to be straight out in front of that crack and a little more to the passenger side,” he says.

  The absence of bloodstains on the driver’s side of the undercarriage and their presence on the front passenger side further supports a blood source on the passenger side of the vehicle, and their absence at the rear indicates that the source of blood was located in the area of the front passenger door. These findings were supported when the truck was sprayed with luminol, a highly sensitive blood reagent used to detect trace amounts usually left behind after a cleanup. After spraying, the Dodge Ram glowed blue in the dark at the front passenger door, step rail, rear wheel, and rear quarter panel, as well as the driver’s-side step rail, to a lesser extent, and the cargo bed.

  As he finishes up his questioning of Jones, Tony Leitch offers up three hypotheticals for the witness to consider. Scene one: Leitch asks Jones if the blood situation is consistent or not with a shot from behind (meaning from the passenger in the back seat). Jones can’t say, because there are too many variables and “so many dynamics involved.”

  Scene two: Leitch asks if a shot could have come from the driver’s seat. “Yes it could, but I lack some things that would help me out,” says Jones.

  Scene three: Leitch asks if there could have been two shooters. “I can’t say either way with that,” Jones replies. “The problem I have is I have a cleanup.”

  “Is there anything inconsistent with a person being shot in the passenger seat?”

  No, says Jones.

  —

  DURING THEIR CROSS-EXAMINATIONS OF Jones and Banks, both defence teams ask about a shell casing for a .380 calibre bullet discovered in the back of the truck. The casing, a metal tube left behind after a gun is fired, was not present when the first photos of the truck interior were taken. It dislodged at some point after the truck was removed from the trailer but no one saw where exactly it came from—only that it ended up underneath the flipped-up back seats.

  In his questioning of Banks, Nadir Sachak tries to establish that the casing must have fallen from the back seat, where Mark Smich had been, because it could not have rolled from the front without making a supposedly impossible journey over a large hump in the floor. Thomas Dungey argues that the truck had been transported all over Southern Ontario and then jerked around to get it out of the trailer in Tillsonburg. The casing could have easily moved to the back from the front seat area, he says. The only thing the two defence lawyers agree on is that the police should know where the cartridge came from—that they should have observed it right from the beginning. But Jones says he may have inadvertently dislodged the casing when he leaned into the truck looking for small bloodstains and put pressure on the rear passenger seat with his hand.

  “You have no notes,” Dungey says to him accusingly.

  “That is correct,” he replies.

  “No notes whatsoever about the casing, correct?”

  “No, my job was to look at bloodstains. I look at bloodstains. I don’t deal with other items. If I come across something, I let other officers know,” he says, adding that this is what he did.

  Dungey raises his voice, trying to make Jones look careless, but it’s no easy task given the detailed blood-spatter presentation he has just made and his obvious knowledge.

  “The casing tells me nothing when it comes to blood pattern analysis,” Jones tells Dungey. “When a casing is ejected from a gun, it can end up anywhere in the vehicle.”

  All of a sudden Dungey, who had not been pleased about the casing being found in the back seat area, where his client had sat, pivots. His hostility to Jones vanishes. “If a person, say the driver, points the gun, there’s a good chance the casing would go flying to the back?” Dungey asks.

  “It’s possible,” says Jones.

  As Dungey starts grilling him about trajectories and what would happen if a bullet was shot from the back seat, Pillay objects. He says it’s not Jones’ area of expertise. Jones tells Dungey he would need a shooting reconstructionist to come up with possibilities about where the shooter was.

  Dungey persists, suggesting that the driver must have shot Mr. Bosma; otherwise the front passenger window wouldn’t be smashed. He asks if a shot from a Walther PPK .380, the gun the Crown believes Millard and Smich used, could go right through the neck of Mr. Bosma and then through the window. After Pillay objects again, the judge tells Smich’s lawyer to move on, but Dungey’s point has been made. After a few more questions about blood spatter, he wraps things up. “Thank you very much, sir,” he says to Jones, who’s been transformed from target to revered expert in the course of a brief cross-examination. “I appreciate it very much.”

  As a result of Dungey’s detour, Tony Leitch makes a rare misstep during his re-examination of Jones. “Are you a shooting reconstructionist?” he asks.

  “I’ve been trained in it, yes.”

  Dungey is thrilled by this unexpected answer while Leitch seems surprised by it. In hindsight it makes sense that like Jones would know about bullet trajectories. And, even though he wasn’t qualified as an expert witness in the field, the jury now knows that he thinks the location of the shell casing has nothing to do with the position of the shooter. When it comes to the spent cartridge, neither defence team has any advantage.

  —

  THE FINAL TEST PERFORMED on the truck by the forensics officers was a cyanoacrylate fuming, also known as the superglue fingerprint search. Cyanoacrylate, a key ingredient in superglue, reacts with the traces of amino acids, fatty acids, and proteins found in latent fingerprints to form a sticky white substance along the ridges of the fingerprint. The resulting image can then be photographed directly or, if necessary, further enhanced. To do the fuming, the cyanoacrylate must be in its gaseous form. This is accomplished by setting alight a small amount of liquid superglue in a container—the police refer to their cyanoacrylate test kits as “hot shots”—in a sealed environment, which in this case was Tim Bosma’s truck.

  Laura McLellan tells the court that they found only one fingerprint as a result of the fuming. It was on the rear-view mirror and would later be matched to Dellen Millard’s right thumb. Another print, which was eventually identified as being from Millard’s left ring finger, was discovered when the entire exterior of the truck was dusted with grey fingerprint powder. It was on the driver’s-side door to the right of the handle. These prints were two of twenty-three impressions found on twenty different items. No further information is provided as to who the rest belonged to.

  —

  CHAZ MAIN IS A bearded twenty-something wearing jeans, an untucked plaid shirt, and, his most noticeable item of apparel, snowmobile boots tied with fluorescent green laces. Given the fresh snow outside, he would almost certainly rather be spending this February day out “sledding.” But thanks to his fondness for riding motorized sports vehicles on rural properties, Main discovered some key evidence in the Tim Bosma case.

  Main tells the court that on Saturday, May 11, 2013, the day after Millard was arrested, he was coming over a hill on his dirt bike when he saw a flash from a camera and got waved over by a group of people he would later learn were police. They had a search warrant for Millard’s farm, where Main was out riding.

  “I had permission to be on the fields, so I asked what the big commotion was,” says Main. He and his friend Adam, whose father owns a neighbouring property, had struck a deal with the farmer who used to lease Millard’s land. In exchange for a case o
f beer and a bottle of Crown Royal whisky, they were free to off-road on the farm so long as they didn’t do any damage to the crops. Main, who works in the concrete business in Toronto, estimated he had ridden the land more than a hundred times. He knew the farm well, but he had never met Dellen Millard, who had owned the land for two years at that point.

  Sergeant Annette Huys, the officer taking photos, asked Main if he would be willing to make a statement, which he was. She directed him to Detective Constable Ben Adams, who was parked down by the barn, near the road. Main got into the back seat of Adams’s unmarked police car.

  “I told them about a bunch of weird activities,” Main says, “a big redneck smoker in the woods and an excavator in the swamp.” He had even taken pictures, because no one would believe him, he said, if he’d told them what was going on at the farm, including what he described as “people doing an engine swap in the middle of a swamp.”

  When Adams learned that the first time Main had seen the strange “smoker” was just the previous day, on Friday, he asked him to show police the machine, as well as the excavator and a skid-steer loader Main had reported seeing in the swamp. Main jumped back on his dirt bike and led the way, while Adams, Huys, and Sergeant Phil Peckford followed in a white four-wheel-drive police vehicle. About one hundred and fifty metres north, they reached a laneway in the middle of a treeline, an old farmers’ road partially grown over at one end, where the “smoker” was parked. Main remained in the adjacent farmer’s field while the police officers went to inspect the curious machine.

  “We weren’t quite sure what it was,” Adams tells the court. “Having never seen anything like this before, we weren’t sure it was safe.” Peckford described it as looking like a large barbecue. Huys was taken aback by its size. The machine was some ten to eleven feet tall and mounted on a trailer with a hundred-pound propane tank affixed to it. Stencilled on the side of what it would later become clear was the burn chamber were the words THE ELIMINATOR in giant red letters. A metal tag on the device read, “Small and large animal cremators, a product of Southern Breeze Fabricators,” a company based in Camilla, Georgia.

  “I think I had in my mind it was going to be a smoker, from Chaz,” says Huys. “We just sort of walked around it and figured out what it was. Just looking at the sheer size of it, I thought there was a real possibility someone could be inside of it.” Huys looked inside a small squarish door near the base but found no signs of a body. Then she climbed up on the trailer and opened the hatch to the main chamber. There was no one inside, so the police asked Main to show them the swamp.

  As the officers headed farther north, they came across two patches of cornfield that had been scorched. They also smelled an accelerant, possibly gasoline. In these two large burn circles, one of which looked as if it had recently been cleaned up, they spotted debris. (The scorch marks were not from the Eliminator, whose burn chamber interior is lined in cement, ensuring that its exterior doesn’t overheat.) When they reached the swamp, the situation was as Main had described it: there was a partially buried excavator and a skid-steer, a small tractor-like vehicle more commonly referred to by the brand name Bobcat. Adams called Detective Matt Kavanagh to let him know what they had found.

  Huys, who works in the Hamilton Police Service’s forensics branch, returned to the Eliminator. She gently lifted out a thin piece of curved white bone from the main chamber only to find another smaller piece of bone underneath. She took photos of them from a series of different angles before carefully packing them up as evidence and returning to police headquarters. Because she needed help determining if the bones were animal or human, Huys sent the photos she had just taken to Tracy Rogers, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Toronto who consults for the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service. She was the primary forensic anthropologist during the investigation of serial killer Robert Pickton in 2002 and 2003, helping to identify the remains of women murdered on Pickton’s British Columbia pig farm.

  Rogers told Huys that her initial impression was that the bones were human but that she needed to see them in person. The next morning, a Sunday, Rogers arrived at the police station, where she confirmed her suspicions. On Monday, May 13, Rogers and a team of students visited the farm to examine the Eliminator and the burn circles.

  —

  WHEN ROGERS FIRST APPROACHED the incinerator, it was covered in a blue tarp. She was dressed in the white Tyvek coveralls often referred to by forensics officers and scientists as a bunny suit. Sergeant Huys pointed out the machine’s bottom door, where Rogers saw some small bone fragments. Her first task was to carefully remove them so that if any more skeletal remains fell down from the main chamber she would know where they had come from.

  Rogers then looked into the burn chamber to examine the seven concrete tubes traversing the width of its rectangular space. According to the plan devised with Huys, Rogers would start her recovery of remains on the right, moving tube by tube to the left until she reached the far left side, where most of the remains were caught up in a deep groove. As Rogers removed each bone fragment she would carefully hand it to Huys, who would assign it an exhibit number, photograph it, and place it in a little packet fashioned from aluminum foil and lined with paper towel so the fragile bone would not be scraped.

  When all the liftable fragments on a given tube were removed, Rogers swept up any tiny remaining pieces and ash and bagged them as exhibits. She did this for tubes one to six by leaning into the incinerator, but for the final tube she became concerned that she was blocking the light and might inadvertently dislodge remains without seeing them. “With the fragile nature of bone, I needed to be closer,” she tells the court. “I decided the only way was to get inside.”

  She and Huys shone a light up through the bottom opening and then Rogers worked inside the machine to clear out the far left side. When she needed a break, she walked over to the neighbouring field where her students were examining the burn sites, now protected by a giant forensic tent. Although the weather had turned cold and windy, they had to keep the tent sides open to let light in and not be overcome by the accelerant fumes.

  Working with the police, the students set up two grids to allow them to search the area systematically. They placed pink and orange pin flags whenever they found anything in the debris and itemized their findings as exhibits, noting the location of each. Three seat-belt buckles were all recovered in one corner of a grid. Other findings included grommets, a metal spring, a large piece of burned wood, metal objects, a plastic bottle, partially melted glass, and a few coins.

  Rogers continues to give the jury a detailed explanation of her work. She tells the court that the bigger of the two bones originally shown to her is the human left radius, the outer of the two bones in the forearm when the hand is extended palm upward. The curvature of the bone, displayed on the courtroom screens, is a result of fire damage, she says. She identifies the smaller bone as a human metacarpal in the palm of the hand associated with a second or third finger. Although she hasn’t been able to determine if it is from the left or right hand, due to damage, she can tell it is human. Proportionally, human bones tend to be longer and thinner than animal bones, Rogers tells the jury. “Because we stand upright and don’t use our upper limbs for weight bearing, the joints in humans look, as a result, very different from animals.”

  She explains that because bone is mostly mineral—some 70 percent—it doesn’t turn to ash and disappear. The areas containing water and organic parts will burn out of bone, but the bone itself is left intact enough to recognize all the structures, even when burned at very high temperatures. (In human cremation, as it is now practised in crematoria, after the incineration phase is complete dry bone fragments are pulverized by a machine called a cremulator to process them into ashes.)

  Rogers makes for a compelling witness as she stands up and points to the screen beside the witness box, explaining that the metacarpal is a good bone to use in determining whether remains are human. The rounded knuckle pa
rt with its bone curvature is very different in animals, who have to use their paws for power and speed and, as a result, have joints that lock together better than they do in humans, who do other things with these bones. The smooth head, lacking the ridge seen in animals, is one of the qualities that has allowed Rogers to determine that the bones found in the incinerator on Dellen Millard’s farm are human.

  As a forensic anthropologist, one of Rogers’s specialties is the determination of sex and age-at-death from bones and bone fragments. In 1999, she published a key research paper on how to determine the sex of skeletal remains from looking at the distal end of the humerus, or upper arm bone, better known to non-anatomists as the funny bone. Rogers had set out to discover whether the fact that males and females have a different so-called carrying angle of the arm—approximately ten to fifteen degrees in males and twenty to twenty-five degrees in females—manifested itself in their elbow joints. She identified four morphological features of the distal humerus that could be used, with 92 percent accuracy, to determine sex when dealing with fragmentary remains.

  In her examination of the Eliminator, she recovered a part of the distal humerus. Despite heat and fire damage, it was still in good enough condition to allow her to assess two of the four traits she would normally use to make a sex identification. She determined, with 75 percent accuracy, that these were the remains of a male. To assess age, Rogers inspected the head of the recovered radius bone where it meets the elbow. She found no evidence of arthritis or the telltale pitting found on older people’s bones. “Can you see how nice and round and clear that surface is? That’s exactly what a younger person would look like,” she explains to the jury as the forearm bone is shown, once again, on courtroom screens. “I would estimate this person was under forty years of age.”