Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  Throughout April 2013, Hussey had been arranging meetings with potential FBO clients and business partners, ranging from Bearskin Airlines to Esso. He kept Dellen Millard up to date with a stream of enthusiastic text messages and requests for meetings. At 7:53 on the morning after Tim Bosma disappeared, Millard replied to one of Hussey’s texts: “Haven’t forgotten about you, just haven’t had a brake [sic] yet.” A few hours later, he messaged again, asking Hussey to meet him at the airport the next day at noon.

  Unlike Jennings, Hussey had not heard the news about Tim Bosma’s disappearance, so he didn’t think twice about the truck at the hangar. When he asked casually where it came from, Schlatman told him Dell had bought it in Kitchener. At his meeting with Millard, Hussey didn’t raise the topic. He remembers thinking Millard looked tired, with bags under his eyes, while his hair, which “he usually styled in some way, was just kind of thrown over.” Hussey and Millard arranged another meeting for two days later, on Friday, May 10, with two other potential partners.

  Later that afternoon, Schlatman tried, at Millard’s request, to remove the windshield from Millard’s red Dodge Ram truck, the one they had taken to Mexico two years earlier. To assist with this task, which he had never carried out before, the mechanic had ordered a special windshield removal kit, which was promptly delivered by nearby NAPA Auto Parts. Schlatman was a good customer, buying thousands of dollars’ worth of parts every month. This, though, was his first purchase of a windshield kit. It was also the only one the NAPA sales rep had ever sold in his five years on the job.

  The kit turned out to be a dud. Schlatman couldn’t figure out how to work it and eventually gave up, leaving the windshield on the red truck intact. He tells the court that Millard never explained why he wanted the windshield removed and that he never asked. When Schlatman inquired as to how the black truck had gotten to the hangar when it had no front seats, Millard said he’d driven it while sitting on a pail. According to Schlatman, that was as far as the conversation went. It was a similar kind of explanation to the one Jennings received when, earlier in his internship, he had wondered aloud about the presence in the hangar of vehicles with their interiors stripped out and was told that Millard was highly allergic to mould. “It’s strange to understand,” Jennings tells the court. “I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to.”

  —

  IGNORING WEIRD GOINGS-ON WAS a prerequisite for working at Millardair. When Dellen bought a $60,000 excavator, took it for a joyride, and blew out the engine, leaving it stuck in a swamp, Schlatman’s reaction, he tells the court, was, “That’s Dell.” He and Hussey headed out to the farm to help remove the machine from the mud. They tried towing it out using a Bobcat, failed, switched to a snowmobile and, not surprisingly, failed again. When he finally realized this approach wasn’t going to work, Schlatman attempted the unsuccessful “engine swap” witnessed by Chaz Main. In the end, Millard’s mechanic had to call in backup in the form of another excavator, which was used to pull the damaged engine out and replace it with a new one. Only then could the excavator finally be driven out of the swamp, where it had been stuck for months.

  Nor was Dellen the only Millard handing out strange work assignments. When Wayne was alive, staff might arrive at Millardair only to be told their job that day was transporting barrels filled with oil and kerosene to the barn on Dellen’s farm for storage. On another occasion, employees were instructed to remove straw from the barn and spread it on the fields. Spencer Hussey thought they were doing it because Dell wanted to convert the barn into a house, while Javier Villada was told it was because the straw was a fire hazard. There was never an explanation that satisfied everyone.

  Yet all this paled in comparison to the project that occupied Schlatman for several weeks during the spring and summer of 2012. Dellen had asked him to build a homemade incinerator. At Millard’s request, he welded together three fifty-gallon green steel drums on a steel base. The device, which is shown to the court during Schlatman’s testimony, looks like a high school student’s entry in a science competition to build your own rocket ship.

  “Whose idea was it to build this thing?” asks prosecutor Craig Fraser.

  “That was Dell’s,” says Schlatman. He explains that Millard planned to use it to burn garbage.

  “Did you ever use it for garbage?” Fraser asks.

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “Did Mr. Millard use it for garbage?”

  “I do believe he tried, but it didn’t work very well.”

  “Do you know what kinds of garbage would be burned?”

  “From Riverside and Maple Gate. There was a lot of garbage produced from those properties. He wanted some way to dispose of it cheaper and quicker.”

  It was a preposterous story. Millard’s residential properties all had regular city garbage, recycling, and compost collection. The idea that it made sense to drive more than one hundred kilometres to dispose of normal household waste in a homemade incinerator was beyond belief. Yet according to his testimony, Schlatman never so much as raised an eyebrow at the plan, even when he almost caused a serious accident. “Having to wash the barrels out real well. Had small fireball out of one barrel,” Schlatman texted Millard on May 25, 2012. “Luckily had barrel facing out overhead door so No prob other than dirty underwear! Lol.”

  “Haha, shame I missed it,” Millard wrote back. “So no incinerator today?”

  “No lookin like monday it will be done.”

  On Monday, Schlatman and Millard exchanged more texts. “That’s the idea,” wrote Millard regarding a photo they had been looking at. “needs double the number of vents, and a guard to prevent egress of large embers and light.”

  Then Millard messaged his friend Mark Smich about getting together that evening: “We go do incinerator, cool?”

  “Yo I’m down bro. I would even say come sooner then that. Then we can chill and talk about other shit as well.”

  Schlatman had fixed up a trailer for Millard to tow the incinerator from the hangar to the farm for its test. Whatever happened next was not documented at the trial, but the text messages available indicate that it was not a success. Millard asked Schlatman to make still more modifications. Schlatman promised that he would get to it as soon as possible but said he was being delayed by Wayne, who had asked him to measure the hanger.

  When that task was complete, he texted Dellen about the incinerator. “Did you want existing air holes covered or leave them and add more?”

  “If the new guards cover the old holes, leave em. if not, fill em,” Dellen instructed.

  “Ok guards will cover.”

  “Great, don’t forget handles for easy moving,” said Millard.

  Two days later, Schlatman asked, “Incinerator up to snuff now?” Presumably it wasn’t, because by June 18, after a month of experimentation, Millard finally gave up on homemade devices and instructed his mechanic to research professionally manufactured livestock incinerators.

  “Cost on small 250 lb [capacity] incinerator is $11,390,” Schlatman texted Millard the next day. “Next model is 500 lb and sells for $13,440. Tax and Shipping extra.”

  “Interesting, double capacity for 18% higher cost,” said Millard. “And they run off propane?”

  Schlatman confirmed that he was looking at the propane model.

  “Put an order in for the larger one,” Millard instructed. “Use the red Visa.”

  Millard’s story about why he needed an incinerator had shifted by this point, but Schlatman was satisfied with the new explanation: his boss was thinking of getting into the pet cremation business. Millard told him that his uncle, a veterinarian, wanted to cut the high cost of destroying animal carcasses in Toronto. He thought he could “help his uncle out and possibly pick up business from other vets in the area,” Schlatman tells the court. Millard, he says, was always looking for new ways to make money. It wasn’t up to him to question what kind of profit margins there were in pet incineration, or why Millard would find it a more desirab
le career than aviation.

  In his usual manner, Schlatman just did what he was told. He ordered the Eliminator from its Canadian distributor, Tristar Dairy, Hog and Poultry, based in Grunthal, Manitoba. When it arrived at the hangar, he unboxed it and took photos on his phone. On July 9, 2012, he wrote to Bill Penner, the sales representative he had worked with: “Hi Bill, received the unit on Thursday. Wow, very impressive.” He had some problems getting the machine up and running, but after much back and forth with Tristar and the Georgia manufacturers, Schlatman finally succeeded. A six-hour test burn was conducted at the hangar, and Millard was instructed on how to operate the device. At his boss’s request, Schlatman also constructed a special trailer so the Eliminator would be mobile and outfitted it with a generator and a propane tank. When everything was ready, the incinerator was moved from the hangar to its new home in the barn at Millard’s farm. Just as he had photographed its arrival, Schlatman took pictures of its departure. On August 13, he sent another email to Penner: “BTW - SN 500 is working great now. Sounds awesome when the afterburner kicks in!!”

  The Eliminator was paid for by Millardair, a purchase entered into the company books by Lisa Williams, a contract bookkeeper who originally met the Millards through Dellen’s uncle, Robert Burns. Burns’s veterinary clinic was next door to a computer and IT business owned by Williams and her husband. Williams tells the court that the incinerator receipt did not stand out to her, and she never made any inquiries about it. Somehow, however, her husband, Charles Dubien, who had installed the security system at the hangar, found out about the Eliminator and mentioned it to Dr. Burns, Dellen’s supposed business partner. Burns tells the court he was shocked by Dubien’s information. He had never once discussed going into the pet incineration business, with his nephew. He was completely satisfied with the carcass disposal company he had used for the past twenty-six years.

  From Burns’s body language and tone, it is evident that he despises Millard. While Millard tries to make eye contact with his uncle as he walks into court, Burns refuses to look at him. “He’s my sister’s son,” he tells Tony Leitch. “Biologically, he’s my nephew.” Burns says he looked after Millard regularly from the time he was three, when Dellen’s parents split up, until he was about fifteen, but he describes their recent relationship as “distant.” His testimony, which is confined as closely as possible to details about the Eliminator, is interrupted twice for legal arguments. Burns spends less than half an hour on the stand and police escort him out of the courthouse, keeping photographers at bay.

  —

  ART JENNINGS AND HIS son-in-law had come to an unspoken agreement to all but ignore the strange activities at Millardair. But on Thursday, May 9, Jennings broke that pact. While Schlatman was otherwise occupied, Jennings took out his phone and snapped several pictures of the black Dodge Ram, including close-up photos of the VIN through the windshield. He then called Crime Stoppers, gave the operator the number’s last six digits, and asked her to check if it was the Bosma truck. “That’s all I can tell you right now,” he told her. “I will call you back if you check those VIN numbers.”

  “I was pacing, going outside, having fifteen cigarettes. I was hoping beyond hope it was not the truck and Dell was not involved.… She said, ‘Yes, it is the truck. Where is it? Please tell us where it is.’ ” Because Crime Stoppers guarantees anonymity, it does not trace calls and is unable to do so. It relies on sources like Jennings who don’t want to go to the police but have information about a crime.

  Jennings told the Crime Stoppers operator that he couldn’t tell her where the truck was and that he would call back later that day. “I went into shock. I went inside my pickup truck and vomited because I was that upset. I was upset for everybody.” Most of all, he says, he feared for his family.

  Although he phoned his wife, Jennings still didn’t talk to his son-in-law. “I knew Shane and Dellen were so close that I didn’t want to cause a rift between them,” he says. At 4:30 P.M., he phoned Crime Stoppers back and they patched him through to the police. Again, Jennings refused to give them the truck’s location, this time saying he would get back to them the next day after talking to his family. He sent Shane a text asking him to stop by his house after work. His daughter was there as well as his wife. Shane arrived and blew up. He said he was going to quit Millardair the next day and then he left.

  Whether at the family meeting or shortly after it, a storyline emerged, one that Schlatman says endured right up to the trial: that Millard might have inadvertently tangled himself up with real criminals. “I thought maybe he had got himself into getting a stolen truck,” Schlatman tells the court. “The Dell Millard I know, he’s a nice guy. I would have never connected him with this.”

  Jennings’s version is similar. “My concern was, ‘What has Dell got himself into?’ I didn’t know how far up this went. I didn’t want to bring harm upon myself or my family. It was better just to stay off to the side and let’s see what happens.”

  Although Schlatman denies it repeatedly on the witness stand, his text messages suggest that he spoke with Millard after talking to his father-in-law. Just before ten that same Thursday evening, Millard, referring to the Bosmas, texted Schlatman, “I can’t stop thinking about what that family’s going through.”

  There is no record that Millard was replying to an earlier text from his mechanic, so Craig Fraser asks Schlatman what prompted that message if, as Schlatman claims, he had not talked to Millard about the Bosma truck. The witness can’t provide any kind of credible explanation for the texts between him and Millard that night. To hear him tell it, that first text from Millard arrived out of the blue, followed two hours later by another one about the truck: “I want to take it back, but I’m a little concerned about how that’s going to play out,” Millard wrote.

  “Ya that’s a tough call man,” Schlatman replied. “Have you considered goin to cops? Tell em you bought this truck but you think its warm.”

  “Hypothetically: if this is the same one, I’m in a lot of jeapordy: what truck?”

  Fraser asks Schlatman what the last text from Millard means.

  “I assumed he was playing dumb not knowing what truck I was talking about,” says Schlatman.

  Another explanation is that Millard was feeding Schlatman his lines using the hangar code. He was telling Schlatman not to talk about the truck, that it was gone and had never been at the hangar. If anyone asked, all Schlatman had to say was “What truck?” It was okay to lie about it because Dellen was in jeopardy from the criminals setting him up, the same ones, no doubt, that his lawyer would later suggest were framing Millard. For Schlatman, this was justification enough for not telling anyone that Tim Bosma’s truck had been sitting in Dellen Millard’s hangar for at least two days.

  —

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, JENNINGS brought his son-in-law coffee and doughnuts, as if it were just a regular day. And in a sense it started out that way. The black truck was gone, the green tarp was gone, and the giant trailer that had been outside the hangar was also gone. “When I asked [Shane] where the truck was, I was told to mind my own business, stay out of it,” Jennings says. He did, however, see tracks on the floor leading to one of the main doors for planes. They stood out, because earlier that week Jennings had been ordered to mop the entire hangar floor, an assignment he clearly resented.

  Although he had told the police he would call Friday morning, Jennings didn’t follow up. Instead, he and his son-in-law got to work on another trailer project for Millard, which Shane was adamant had to be done. Hussey stopped by for his meeting, at which Millard told him that all potential FBO partners would have to contribute $5,000 to the business. That was a significant amount for Hussey, who tells the court he was surprised by the demand. He left the hangar by 2 P.M., just before the police arrived.

  Jennings also missed the police visit, as he was on a supply run to Home Depot. When he returned, he found his son-in-law and Millard talking. “Dell was looking at me. Shane would lo
ok at me, turn his head. They were having a heated discussion,” he says. Millard came over and told Jennings to get all his stuff and go home.

  “That’s when I…found out that the police had been there,” Jennings testifies. “He wasn’t angry, just calm, same old Dell. It really had me confused.”

  Jennings collected his tools, his golf cart, which he worked on when there was nothing else to do at the hangar, and a meat smoker. He gave his Millardair key fob back to Schlatman. “I felt like a mouse in a trap,” he says. “I didn’t know if someone was going to come in and whack me. I had no idea. I didn’t know what was going on. I packed up all my stuff, drove it home.”

  After the police left the hangar, Millard told Schlatman he had done nothing wrong. As was his custom, Schlatman didn’t pose any uncomfortable questions. In the courtroom, Craig Fraser asks him why not.

  “He had said he wanted to move the red Dodge pickup truck,” Schlatman answers, as if that makes sense.

  “Was this immediately after the police left?” asks Fraser.

  “Immediate-ish,” says Schlatman.

  Fraser establishes that there had been no previous discussion about moving Millard’s red truck, the same one from which Schlatman was asked to remove the windshield.

  Schlatman says Millard told him “he wanted to have a vehicle outside the hangar in case the hangar was locked down. I was under the impression that for some reason the police might be back and not allow him into the hangar.”

  Schlatman quickly arranged for a friend who lived nearby to store the red truck. Millard drove it over and Schlatman followed in his black Dodge Caravan as the Waterloo Police surveillance unit watched their every move. The two men returned to the hangar in Schlatman’s van.