Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  Michalski says that on the Sunday before Tim Bosma disappeared, he left the Maple Gate house at about 1 P.M. to go rollerblading along the Lake Ontario waterfront with his cousin. He remembers having seen Millard alone at the house that morning, before Millard’s cell phone data put him near Mark Smich’s mother’s Oakville home in the early afternoon. By 3 P.M., both Millard’s and Smich’s phones, along with the Bate phone, were in North Toronto, near Igor Tumanenko’s apartment building. The Bate phone was used to call Tumanenko to tell him the potential truck buyers were waiting downstairs. During that same one-hour period, the Smich phone received texts from Marlena Meneses, his girlfriend, and the Millard phone received a text from an unknown number. All of these communications pinged towers near Tumanenko’s home. At 4:36, when the Sunday test drive was over, the Bate phone was used again to call that other possible nice guy, Omar Palmili. He was lucky enough to sleep through it.

  Michalski remembers speaking to Millard and Smich in the kitchen at Maple Gate at about five o’clock that afternoon. They told him they had been on a test drive and Smich said he was sick.

  “That was their excuse for not stealing the truck,” Michalski says.

  “Can you recall anything else they said?” asks Fraser.

  “They mentioned they were going to see another truck later on in the week,” says Michalski. He tells Fraser that Millard’s demeanour was normal, while Smich looked visibly sick.

  Fraser asks why Michalski didn’t say anything about the truck stealing plan.

  “I think I was more minding my own business than anything,” Michalski says.

  The next day, Monday, May 6, Michalski left early to work a seven-to-four shift at the Campbell Soup Company in Etobicoke. He didn’t see his housemate Millard, who met his mother for lunch at a Bier Markt restaurant, where he picked up a certified cheque for $420,000 to help him out of his condo-closing difficulties. At some point during the day, Millard also gave Javier Villada, who was working at widening the Maple Gate driveway, some $900 in back pay.

  By about 8 P.M., texts between Millard and Shane Schlatman were bouncing off a tower near Smich’s home. Millard was picking up his friend for another test drive. From 8:45 to 9:00 P.M., both the Smich and Millard phones were pinging towers in Ancaster as they sent and received texts. At 9:05, the Bate phone also pinged an Ancaster tower, when it called Tim Bosma. It was the last communication the burner phone ever made. The Smich phone texted Meneses from Ancaster at 9:20 P.M. and then either shut down or was turned off for the next twelve hours. The Millard phone stayed on, receiving a series of texts that evening from Lisa Whidden, Millard’s realtor girlfriend. During the early morning of May 7, they text chatted casually about pets as the body of Tim Bosma was being incinerated within metres of Millard.

  The message telling Schlatman and Jennings not to come to the hangar was sent at 5:55 A.M., minutes before GA Masonry’s video camera recorded the Eliminator being towed into the hangar. A few hours later, when he was back at home, Millard sent his text reassuring Schlatman that he hadn’t done anything wrong and should just take the day off. Meanwhile, Smich, who had returned to his mother’s house in Oakville, charged up his phone and received all the text messages he had missed overnight, including several from Meneses, who had been worried about whether her boyfriend, who she knew was out stealing a truck, was okay.

  Andrew Michalski’s first sighting of Millard on Tuesday, May 7, was late in the afternoon, when Michalski got home from work. “He was on the computer. I asked him if they got the truck, and he said yes.”

  “If you can reflect back, was there any manner, demeanour, associated with it?” asks Craig Fraser.

  “I don’t remember the demeanour.”

  Why had Michalski asked him if they got the truck? Fraser wants to know.

  “I was just curious.”

  “Do you recall, after Tuesday, May 7, when it was that you next saw Dell?”

  “I don’t believe I saw him that week,” says Michalski, who first learned something was wrong when Mark Smich contacted him the following Friday night, after Millard’s arrest.

  —

  MATTHEW HAGERMAN, WHO AS a high school student had introduced the older Dellen Millard to his circle of friends, tells the court that in the year before Tim Bosma was murdered, the group surrounding Millard—including himself and Andrew Michalski—had begun to disconnect. “Everybody got busy with their own lives,” he says. “We were all backing away. We all had our own things happening.” But the more Hagerman talks, the more it becomes apparent that his definition of disconnecting won’t be shared by everyone. By his own admission, he and Millard texted each other several times a week. And when Millard’s driver’s licence was suspended in October 2012, for reasons that are not revealed in court, Hagerman acted as his personal paid driver.

  While Hagerman was no longer living in Millard’s basement, as he once did, he was still closely tied to the friend he said he had known for as long as he could remember. His grandmother Dina had cared for Millard’s grandmother when she was dying of cancer. Until Wayne Millard died, Dina had looked after his and Dellen’s many pets at Maple Gate, done laundry for Wayne, and prepared some of his meals. Despite these connections, Hagerman was spared the social media notoriety experienced by Shane Schlatman and Andrew Michalski. Unlike them, he never had his name bandied about on Facebook and Twitter as a possible accomplice in the Bosma murder. In fact, until he was called to testify at the trial, he had successfully avoided the unflattering spotlight this tragedy has cast.

  A slight, bearded man with a hipsterish look, Hagerman appears visibly anxious in the courthouse halls before his testimony begins. When he leaves court, he hides his face behind a scarf, a toque, and sunglasses and dives into the back of a waiting car. He is accompanied throughout by his father and another middle-aged man. Hagerman walks tentatively to the witness box and back, sometimes casting a quick glance at Dellen Millard. On the stand, he fights to hold back tears as a side of his life that has remained hidden is exposed.

  Craig Fraser displays what is known as an extraction report on the courtroom screens. It shows text messages between Hagerman and Millard from October 2012 taken from Millard’s phone. The first message is sent at 5:20 P.M. on October 2, 2012, from Millard. “Need a lookout on walkie talkie tonight. 10pm-3am. $50 or credit towards future grabs,” he writes. “Interested?”

  “I have a movie date at 10:20,” Hagerman answers. “Movie runs until 12:30 so i’d be able and willing to help around 1. Where is this going down?”

  “That might actually work out. Waterloo.”

  “Lol okay. What are you going to be thieving?”

  “Lawnmowers. 2 ride ones.”

  Although Millard arranged to pick up Hagerman at a nearby park, the heist fell through. The lawnmowers had been moved before the gang of thieves could get to them. Millard texted Hagerman that they would have to steal them the following spring.

  Two and a half weeks later, on October 19, another “mission”—as Millard and his crew called them—was planned. “Just scoped a construction project with a lot of trees being prepped to be planted,” Millard texted. “You want some 20’ maples?”

  “Lmao what. How is this going to work?”

  “Gotta scope night security. $100 to each lookout upon mission success.”

  “What’s the mission? Must be dangerous if you’re paying :0”

  “Not dangerous for lookouts. Along the same lines as the last one but bigger. 3 am-5am. I’m going to catch some sleep.”

  “Okay. Goodnight sweet prince,” wrote Hagerman. It was the type of line he liked to use.

  “Kowalski will get you if you’re down,” Millard wrote. Kowalski was a nickname for Andrew Michalski, who would be along on the mission, as would Mark Smich and Steven Kenny, another member of the Millard circle. They would be stealing a Bobcat. Although the mission was planned for 3 to 5 A.M., it ran late, like almost everything Millard organized. It wasn’t until 4:15 that Ha
german was picked up at his parents’ house, where he lived.

  Hagerman was deposited on a rural road north of Toronto with a walkie-talkie, Kenny was stationed on another road, and Michalski drove around in the more immediate vicinity, keeping an eye out for anyone who might spot the thieves. Millard and Smich were pulling a trailer. They grabbed the Bobcat, stashed it in the trailer, then drove to the Millardair hangar at Waterloo Airport, where everyone convened at 7:30 A.M. Shane Schlatman removed the GPS from the Bobcat.

  An emotional Hagerman tells the court that this was the only time he ever served as a lookout on one of Millard’s missions. Millard looks on and smirks.

  —

  ON MAY 9, 2013, HAGERMAN had just returned from a vacation and was back to working his regular evening shift bartending at an Etobicoke pub. His father stopped by to give him his newly repaired phone. As soon as he checked it, Hagerman saw he had missed a series of calls from Christina Noudga, whom he knew casually as Dellen Millard’s girlfriend. The number and frequency of the calls made him assume right away that something must be wrong, but when he tried to phone back there was just dead air. His phone had not been properly repaired and the speaker was broken. He couldn’t hear anything.

  After a few more failed attempts at calling, Hagerman started communicating by text. Although Millard never identified himself as the user of the phone, Hagerman was aware right away that the person on the other end was Millard, not Noudga, and that he wanted to ask him a favour. “He was feeling some heat. He wanted me to hang on to something for a few days,” Hagerman tells the court, adding that Millard reassured him it was nothing serious.

  In a text message, Hagerman asked what the “toys” Millard wanted him to keep were, so that he could prepare himself.

  “A toolbox,” came the reply at 1:52 A.M.

  “Haha full of guns,” Hagerman texted back.

  Millard responded just with three dots (“…”), sidestepping further questions.

  To calm his nerves, Hagerman texted two close friends about getting together to discuss the “rather shady” situation. As he recalls, he met up with one of them and then returned home to await Millard’s arrival. At 4:10 A.M., he received a text from his friend that read simply “2.” It meant he was to meet Millard in the driveway in two minutes, Hagerman tells the court.

  Craig Fraser walks across the courtroom to pick up a yellow-and-black Stanley toolbox in a transparent plastic evidence bag. He takes it to the witness stand and places it in front of Hagerman.

  “Does that look familiar?” he asks with distaste.

  Hagerman says it does; it’s the toolbox Millard gave him.

  “Did it have a lock?”

  “It had a small padlock.”

  Fraser asks what vehicle Millard was driving when he pulled up that Friday morning.

  “The Yukon,” says Hagerman. “The windows were very tinted, but I was sure there was someone else in the car. I couldn’t say who.”

  What did Millard say? asks Fraser. How was he acting?

  He was dishevelled, says Hagerman. “I asked him if everything was okay, and he told me it was better if he didn’t tell me.” According to Millard, Hagerman would need to hang on to the toolbox for “a couple of weeks, tops.”

  Did Hagerman ask what was inside?

  Hagerman says he didn’t, because he was familiar with the toolbox. He had seen it at Millard’s Maple Gate home many times.

  “What did you associate that box with?” asks Fraser.

  “Drugs that were brought out at parties.”

  “In the discussion up until the point he hands it over, did he ever say, ‘There are drugs in here’?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I didn’t, no. I figured it was what I had always seen inside of it.”

  Hagerman stored the toolbox in his parents’ basement fruit cellar. “It would have been slightly concealed but not trying to be hidden,” he says. “It was out in the open on a shelf.”

  “Did you attempt to see what was in the toolbox?”

  “Never once.”

  Fraser wonders why earlier, when Hagerman was messaging Millard, he had made a joke about there being guns in the toolbox, a text Hagerman later deleted, along with many others.

  Hagerman says it was an unfortunate attempt at humour, that he had no idea there could really be a gun in the toolbox. “Dellen was not someone who had an interest in guns,” he insists. “I never saw one at the Maple Gate house ever.”

  “Can you tell us what the reason was for the police to come see you on four different occasions?”

  They were suspicious of his involvement with Millard, says Hagerman, admitting he wasn’t truthful when investigators talked with him on May 14, 15, and 22. That changed after Hagerman confessed to his father what was going on. Together they got a lawyer, and Hagerman finally told police the truth on May 30. His father lent him the money for the lawyer, which Hagerman paid back over the next six months.

  —

  “CALL ME ASAP,” Andrew Michalski texted Matt Hagerman at 10:53 P.M. on Friday, May 10, about three and a half hours after Dellen Millard was arrested.

  When he replied at 2:30 the next morning, Hagerman asked, in his typically jokey way, “What’s the situation crustation [sic]?”

  “We have a situation,” Michalski responded at 11:15 A.M. “I need to meet you at your park today.”

  The two men agreed to meet in the late afternoon, with Michalski telling Hagerman, “It’s really important we talk. It’s about the thing someone gave you.”

  Hagerman assumed it was about the toolbox and asked if Millard was in trouble.

  On the witness stand, Hagerman describes Michalski as being in shock. “That is when I found out he was living at Dellen’s house at Maple Gate and that the cops had shown up…and raided the house in the morning,” he says. “And that is when I first heard about Dellen’s arrest.”

  “Was there discussion about what you had and what he had?” asks Fraser.

  Hagerman says Michalski had been given a blue backpack and that Michalski knew Millard had given Hagerman something. “We were both in a panic,” he says. “I was upset. This thing got thrown in my lap just a couple of days ago. And I just wanted to get rid of it.”

  —

  ALTHOUGH MICHALSKI HAD SEEN Facebook posts about the disappearance of Tim Bosma and knew Millard had been going to steal a truck, he had not put two and two together when Mark Smich called him just before 9:30 on Friday night. It was the first of five phone calls they made to each other over the next few hours. Smich told him that “they’ve got Dell, and I should get all the drugs out of the house,” Michalski says.

  As soon as he got off the phone, Michalski grabbed his blue backpack, filled it with all the drugs he could find at Maple Gate, stashed it in the trunk of his car, and moved the car from the driveway to a spot across the street. He also texted Hagerman, because Smich had told him to bring “what Matt Hagerman had” and the drugs to him. He says he had no idea what item in Hagerman’s possession Smich was referring to.

  The next day, Michalski went to work, an early Saturday shift at Campbell’s. In the lunchroom on the TV, he saw that Millard had been arrested for forcible confinement in the Tim Bosma case and started to panic. “I realized what I had in my car and it needed to go to Mark and that was it,” he states in court.

  At two o’clock, he left work early and headed for Hagerman’s house. He suggested to his friend that they should use the Hagerman family car, since Matt’s parents were away at their cottage. When asked about Hagerman’s demeanour, Michalski says, “I don’t remember. I think both of us were uncomfortable.”

  Smich wanted them to bring the toolbox and backpack directly to his girlfriend’s sister’s apartment, where he was temporarily hiding out. “But when I saw the news, I didn’t want to see him, make contact with him,” says Michalski. He arranged a drop-off behind a Shoppers Drug Mart store near Smich.

  As he
made the twenty-minute drive down the QEW to Oakville, with Hagerman at the wheel, Michalski kept in touch with Smich by text. Hagerman turned on the radio to confirm that Millard’s arrest was all over the news, as Michalski had said. When he heard a report about the Bosma case, Hagerman pulled the car over and demanded they get rid of the backpack and toolbox right then and there. They didn’t, but in the ensuing panic and confusion, they ended up at the wrong drop spot, a Shoppers Home Health Care Outlet instead of the store Smich had in mind. At the back of a small strip mall, they went down a concrete staircase to an electrical room and left the backpack and toolbox for Smich at the foot of the stairs.

  Smich wanted to send his buddy Brendan Daly to do the pickup, but he wasn’t answering texts or calls. He had to rely on another friend, Arthur, to do it. Arthur’s last name isn’t revealed in court, but Smich’s co-accused on his 2012 mischief charge for graffiti was Artour Sabouloua, age twenty-one, of Oakville. According to Daly, Smich referred to Artour as his bitch.

  In spite of the fact that Daly saunters up to the witness box with his hands in the pockets of baggy jeans that are about to fall off his backside, he makes a credible witness. He is the friend pictured in the surveillance photos of Mark Smich and has important knowledge of what exactly happened in May 2013. After Daly’s parents realized he had become inadvertently involved in the Tim Bosma murder, they hired a lawyer on his behalf. Daly’s counsel advised him to tell the truth, which he appears to do. It is a popular misconception that lawyering up means shutting up and saying nothing. In cases like Daly’s—where someone has knowledge of a serious crime but was not a party to it and is unlikely to face charges—a good lawyer will generally advise his or her client to come clean and ensure that justice is done.

  Daly, who is a few years younger than Smich, lived around the corner, less than a minute from his friend’s house. They had met three or four years earlier, when Daly spotted Smich sitting on his porch and they struck up a conversation. It was their habit to smoke up together almost every morning. In 2013, neither of them was working and Marlena Meneses was often around.