Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  Once he climbed on board, however, things got strange. Blodgett noticed spots of blood around the boat and asked what was going on. Although media outlets would later report that there was blood all over the yacht, making it sound like a grisly murder scene, in reality it was more like several drops in a few different locations. Millard explained that his companion was having her period and the toilet had blocked, which made sense to Blodgett and could also have accounted for why she didn’t come out to say hello. But as the news about Millard emerged, Blodgett started to wonder why he hadn’t seen the supposedly menstruating woman. He remembered too that Millard had originally left port with one young woman only to return her to shore and set off again with a second woman. He realized he hadn’t seen either Millard or the second woman actually leave the boat when it was returned to Little Current.

  The police performed forensic tests on the boat Millard had rented and grilled Blodgett about the details of everything that had taken place, including where exactly on Lake Huron the yacht’s mechanical failure had occurred. Once officers were spotted at the Little Current docks, it didn’t take long for news to spread through town of a missing woman and a blood-drenched yacht. The Manitoulin Expositor wrote the story up and, from there, it was a short hop to the internet. Within no time big city media had made the trek north and reporters from Toronto were insisting on speaking to Blodgett. Along with the syndicated article that had created the impression there were large amounts of blood all over the boat, a TV reporter tastelessly joked that Blodgett should offer special rates to “crime tourists” and inaccurately suggested on the evening news that Discovery Yacht Charters would be cutting rates to improve its image.

  Things went from bad to worse for the tour operator when the police released a statement labelling Blodgett’s concerns “unfounded,” which deeply upset him. “After spending hours in interviews with investigators, fielding repeated calls from the police, having them come to my home and getting hounded by the media for days on end, I don’t understand why they would choose to leave me looking discredited,” he told the Expositor. “Don’t get me wrong, the police took my report seriously and all the officers involved in this case were extremely respectful, polite and professional to me through the entire process. I just don’t understand why the word ‘unfounded’ would be chosen when they clearly received information that my report to them was accurate, deserving of investigation and not exaggerated based on what we had seen aboard that boat back in September 2011.

  “Honestly, what should I have done?” he asked.

  The Expositor put that very question to the OPP and was told that unfounded is police jargon for when an investigation is wrapped up with no further concern about criminal activities. In this case, both the young women who had been on the yacht with Millard had been identified and found to be safe and secure, so the police were closing the file. “The information brought forward by Mr. Blodgett was valid, and he should be commended for that,” Staff Sergeant Kevin Webb, commander of the OPP’s Manitoulin detachment, told the Expositor. “He took initiative, recognizing some information that may have been useful for the police. We are all very pleased he did.”

  The yacht story was among the last Millard-related pieces to be published before news of the Tim Bosma and Laura Babcock investigations drifted out of the headlines. It coincided with a series of press reports about stolen vehicles at the Millardair hangar, including one about Marty MacDougall, a film producer, whose Harley-Davidson motorcycle had been stolen in its trailer from his back driveway in downtown Toronto the previous fall. While on vacation in Ireland, MacDougall received a text from Hamilton Police telling him his motorbike had been located, albeit in pieces, at a hangar at Waterloo Airport. The Harley had been up for sale on Kijiji when it was stolen, and MacDougall suspected someone might have done a reverse lookup of his phone number to figure out where he lived and where they could find the bike. According to witnesses, two men in a black truck had backed in and taken it away. In addition to the $35,000 Harley, police found multiple stolen vehicles and parts at the Millardair hangar. They were in the process of being repainted and their serial numbers were ground away. The operation had all the characteristics of a chop shop operation.

  As the defence lawyers and prosecutors began their work to prepare for the trial of Millard and Smich, Detective Matt Kavanagh spoke to The Globe and Mail about the murder of Tim Bosma one last time. He said there may not have been a third suspect after all. “As an investigator, you always talk about tunnel vision, and I think it’d be tunnel vision for me to say that I definitely believe there’s a third person or to say there wasn’t,” Kavanagh said. “It’s possible that there’s only two involved, and it’s also possible that there may have been a third. And so we’re looking into that and we still have some doors to shut, some avenues of investigation. In reality, it could have been Smich. Smich could have got out of the Bosma truck and into the Yukon. So that’s why I say I’m not sure.”

  —

  OVER THE SUMMER OF 2013, there continued to be the occasional revelation about the Bosma case, but for the most part it had entered that phase of pretrial limbo where nothing very significant comes out in the news. Millard and Smich made a couple of brief procedural court appearances in Hamilton. A letter written by Millard to a jailhouse groupie, in which he proclaimed his innocence, found its way onto Facebook. And an eBay account in Millard’s name showed that in October 2012 he had purchased two concealment holsters from Barsony Holsters & Belts in Oregon, including a brown leather shoulder holster for a Walther PPK and an IWB, or inside the waistband, holster for a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380.

  It wasn’t until September 2013 that Millard returned to the headlines in a big way. Police searched his farm for a third and final time. It was the most dramatic of the searches, drawing in Toronto homicide detectives, uniformed officers from the local Waterloo force, forensic technicians in lab coats, and an OPP hazmat team with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs and gas masks covering their faces. The road was lined with fire trucks, buses, and vans carrying television news crews. Forensic tents were erected, huge piles of straw were pitched from the barn, and dozens of barrels were removed for testing. The operation, police said, was related to the disappearance of Laura Babcock. It was the second and far larger of the two farm searches looking for evidence in her case and it is not yet known what, if anything, it yielded. Online sleuths speculated wildly about the barrels (the ones that it was later revealed at trial were moved by Spencer Hussey and other Millardair employees) and about a stained board that a photographer snapped being carried out of the barn.

  When the search finally wrapped up, the only new information provided to the public came in answer to a reporter’s question about the mysterious barrels. “The content of the barrels is known and determined not to be relevant to the investigation,” said Staff Inspector Greg McLane, head of the Toronto Police homicide unit. It was the last comment he would make on the investigation before responsibility for all communications related to the Tim Bosma, Laura Babcock, and Wayne Millard cases was handed over to the OPP’s Major Case Management task force.

  From the police’s point of view, the lack of leaks—and therefore lack of news—pertaining to their investigations was a good thing, but it caused frustrations to run high for both the public and reporters. In 2013, the news event Canadians searched for more than any other was, according to Yahoo Canada, the murder of Tim Bosma. Google Canada ranked Tim Bosma fourth on the list of the year’s top trending searches, behind Toronto’s globally notorious mayor Rob Ford, the late Glee star Cory Monteith, and the late Fast & Furious actor Paul Walker, but ahead of the Boston Marathon bombing and the birth of future British monarch Prince George. At CBC News websites, traffic spiked whenever new developments appeared in the Bosma case, while at The Hamilton Spectator, the continuing coverage of the young father’s tragic death was the most read news story of 2013.

  In Toronto, questions arose about the police’
s handling of the disappearance of Laura Babcock and the death of Wayne Millard. Would Tim Bosma and Wayne Millard have still been alive if there had been proper follow-up on Babcock’s last phone bill and the police had checked into Dellen Millard in the summer of 2012? With two major investigations underway in their jurisdiction and the Tim Bosma trial pending, the Toronto Police had an excuse for not answering difficult questions about their performance. A full-fledged inquiry, if eventually it was decided one was needed, couldn’t be launched until the courts had completed the trials, and that could take years. Not to mention that Laura Babcock was still missing and the police had nothing new to tell the public about the case. As for Wayne Millard, he had been cremated almost a year earlier, so it was hard to imagine what evidence investigators could possibly discover.

  —

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the lack of news did not accurately reflect what was going on behind the scenes. The police almost always know more than they are telling. The Bosma, Babcock, and Millard murder investigations were no exception. Throughout the spring and summer and into the winter of 2013–14, investigations were active on multiple fronts, using computer and mobiledevice forensics, DNA, and more.

  Over the course of his work on the Bosma case, James Sloots, one of the forensic biologists who examined the Bosma truck in Tillsonburg alongside officers Banks, McLellan, and Jones, wrote twelve different reports relating to DNA evidence, including the DNA found in and on the truck, the Eliminator, and the three black nitrile gloves seized from Dellen Millard’s pocket at the time of his arrest. The first report was prepared on May 14, 2013, when Sloots looked for, and failed to find, blood on Dellen Millard’s shoes and on leaves taken from under the Eliminator. The last report was dated September 11, 2015, as pretrial motions got going.

  As he begins his testimony at trial, Sloots, who wears round glasses and has a professorial air, tells the jury, “I’m going to put on my teacher hat and give you a DNA 101 course.” He wants to familiarize them with the language he uses and what a DNA profile can and cannot reveal. He reminds his listeners that half their DNA comes from their mother, half from their father. Only 1 percent of an individual’s DNA is unique; the other 99 percent is shared by the entire human race. DNA can be found in blood, semen, saliva, mucus, muscle, bone, teeth, skin, and hair follicles. Not all samples taken from a crime scene will generate a sufficient quantity of DNA to proceed with testing. Sometimes, a bloodstain, for example, will yield only enough DNA for a partial, as opposed to a full, profile, which is drawn from fifteen different tests taken at fifteen different locations along the DNA strand. In the case of the blood from the Bosma truck, Sloots was easily able to get a full DNA profile and look at all fifteen DNA locations. When multiple samples of blood DNA from the truck were compared to DNA taken from Tim Bosma’s toothbrush, a match was made. Although the possibility of the blood in the truck randomly matching Bosma’s is one in eighteen quadrillion (a quadrillion has fifteen zeros), in court the somewhat confusing practice is to say that the person whose DNA is being tested for a match—in this case, Tim Bosma—“cannot be excluded as the source of the blood.”

  Sloots also tested blood found on the Eliminator by Hamilton Police. They submitted three swabs to the Centre of Forensic Sciences, but it turned out that none was sufficient to test for DNA. In December 2013, Sloots and a technologist travelled to the OPP headquarters in Orillia, Ontario, where the Eliminator had been stored, to see if they could find other samples. They took swabs from stains on the metal lip in front of the burn chamber and a metal ledge below the load door.

  “Would your expertise be the same or better than a police agency?” prosecutor Craig Fraser asks Sloots.

  “We see a lot of blood under a lot of different conditions,” says Sloots. “We have a lot of expertise in looking at blood in different conditions.”

  From one of the stains identified on the ledge, Sloots was able to get a full, fifteen-test result, the same level of match obtained from the bloodstains in the truck, with the same random match probability of one in eighteen quadrillion. From another stain on the ledge, he got results from thirteen of fifteen tests, for a one-in-3.7-trillion random match probability. “It’s a little more common,” he tells the court, with no irony intended.

  When Sloots first examined the three black nitrile gloves seized from Millard’s pocket at the time of his arrest, blood was found on two of them. The exterior of the first glove had particles of blood dust on it and a mixture of male and female DNA. Inside the glove, there were DNA profiles for two males and one female. The second glove had a visible bloodstain and the DNA of a male and a female. The third glove had a female DNA profile and no blood found.

  After establishing the presence of DNA on the gloves, the police obtained warrants to get full DNA profiles for Smich and Millard, who were, of course, in custody. They also arranged to get what’s known as a castoff DNA sample from Christina Noudga, Millard’s girlfriend. Officer Jennifer Granatier, who was then with the Hamilton Police surveillance unit, was sent to tail their “target” on September 18, 2013. She was looking for any material Noudga might discard in public—a cigarette butt, drinking straw, or paper coffee cup, for example.

  Granatier waited outside the Noudga family home until Christina emerged in the morning. She followed her on the bus and subway to the university campus where Noudga studied. After Noudga bought a drink at a Booster Juice, Granatier retrieved the discarded cup and straw from a recycling bin. Sloots then compared the Noudga DNA, which was enough to run all fifteen tests, to the female DNA profile on the nitrile gloves. The DNA on the first glove was determined to be that of Tim Bosma, Dellen Millard, and Christina Noudga. The second glove had Millard’s and Noudga’s DNA. The third glove had only Noudga’s.

  —

  ROBERT GERARD, A FORENSIC chemist at the Centre of Forensic Sciences, handled the gunshot residue, (GSR), forensics. Along with examining the so-called tapelift samplers or dabbers, taken from Tim Bosma’s truck in Tillsonburg, Gerard also processed the toolbox. “I sampled the inside of the tray and then I sampled the inside of the actual box,” he tells the court. He examined his samples on a scanning electron microscope, which produces images using a beam of electrons.

  Gunshot residue is composed of the particles produced when a firearm is discharged and a cloud of vapour escapes. The largest source of GSR is the gun’s muzzle, but it can also be expelled from ejection ports and cylinder gaps. The particles can end up on the shooter’s hand and clothing, and on anything else in the area. The identification of GSR requires the presence of lead, antimony, and barium fused into a single microscopic particle. Gerard found one GSR particle in the toolbox tray.

  In court he is asked by Craig Fraser if that’s a significant finding.

  “Yes,” says Gerard. “It shows an association with a firearm.” Either a particle from a firearm landed in the box, a firearm was placed inside it, or someone with GSR on their hands handled it. He explains that it’s not possible to tell how the particle got there or how long it was in the tray. Such particles don’t evaporate or decompose, he says. “They stay there until removed by washing or handling.”

  With the Bosma truck, Gerard worked with a total of twelve GSR tapelift samples compared to the more standard figure of four for a typical vehicle examination. Although Gerard did not do the sampling himself in this case, he describes for the court the process typically followed. He says that for a drive-by shooting, he would sample the window area. For a getaway car, he would test the driver’s door, steering wheel, and stick shift. For a firearm discharged inside a vehicle, he would sample the roof liner and other flat surfaces. In all these cases, samples would be taken exclusively from the interior as the mud and dust on the outside of a vehicle make it too difficult to find samples on the exterior.

  Gerard’s resulting report, prepared on June 28, 2013, showed two GSR particles on the front dash, one on both the front and rear doors on the driver’s side, none on the passenger side front
door, and two on the passenger side rear door. There was one particle found on the rear passenger seat and one on the back of the rear passenger seat. Nothing was found on the driver’s side seats. On the roof liner, twenty-six particles were found on the driver’s side. On the passenger side, where the front and back sections of the liner were sampled separately, ten particles were found in the rear and thirty-five in the front.

  “What is the significance of thirty-five?” Fraser asks.

  “Thirty-five would to me indicate a firearm was discharged very close to that area or someone had a lot of GSR and rubbed it into the roof. The most likely scenario is a firearm discharged close to that spot.”

  “Can you provide any opinion as to where the shot came from?”

  “No.”

  “Is this a limitation generally or one specific to this case?”

  “You can’t use GSR to determine firing angles or anything of that nature,” says Gerard. “All I can say is it’s very likely a firearm was discharged within the vehicle but I can’t say from which spot or which angle.”

  “Are those unusual values for you to see in your work?”