Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  At noon on Friday, May 10, Noudga texted him, “Hope your days [sic] going well,” followed by a photo of herself with Millard’s dog Pedo in bed. She received no reply. At 3:50 P.M., she messaged again: “Text me when you can, I want to see you tonight.” At 8:04, she wrote, “Hellooooo?” And at 9:10, she texted, “Call me.” By this time, of course, Millard had been arrested. There was no call. Noudga didn’t know it, but he was busy being questioned by the Hamilton Police.

  Worried about Millard’s lack of response, Noudga called Andrew Michalski, who told her Millard wasn’t at home but that Pedo was. She then phoned Smich.

  “I said, ‘Hi, Mark, is Dell with you?’ He said, ‘No, but don’t worry about it, Christina. Shit went down. Just don’t worry about it.’ ” She was irritated with Smich for not answering her simple question and for getting her “panicked.”

  Not long after, Madeleine Burns phoned and told Noudga to come to Kleinburg immediately. She sounded hysterical. Noudga persuaded her mother to drive her there and wait outside while she went in to speak with Burns. Noudga’s mother, who had trained as a doctor in the former Soviet Union, was concerned someone might need medical attention, but after Noudga talked to Burns, she reassured her mother and told her to go home.

  Burns informed Noudga that Millard had been arrested for forcible confinement and the theft of a truck. She said Dellen’s lawyer expected the media would soon be arriving at her house and she wanted Christina to accompany her to a hotel. Noudga says Burns kept asking, “Do you think the truck is in the trailer?” and “What if the truck is in the trailer?” Noudga claimed not to know what was in the trailer.

  At the hotel, which is never identified, they checked in and drank some wine before deciding they should go to Maple Gate and pick up chequebooks, power-of-attorney forms, and some $5,000 to $6,000 in cash that Millard kept for emergencies. Once back at the hotel, they had more wine. “We started brainstorming as to what may have happened,” says Noudga. “There’s this giant trailer which he didn’t really give much information about.”

  “At some point, do you look at any media?” asks Leitch.

  “No, it was too disturbing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, it was really stressful. I never expected Dell to get arrested. I don’t want to see what’s going on. I don’t want to know any of this,” says Noudga. “You watch the media, and everything gets twisted around in your mind.”

  “At this stage, you’re saying you and Ms. Burns are not looking at media?”

  “Together, we came to that conclusion,” says Noudga. “My biggest concern was, Holy shit, we touched the trailer, and if the truck is in the trailer, we’re going to get drawn into the mess.”

  Leitch asks who she means by “we.”

  “Myself and Madeleine. Dell was not a concern, because he was arrested.”

  Burns was worried because she had tried to open the trailer to see what was inside.

  “We kind of sit there, and we’re like, Should we go back? Should we do something?”

  They decided that they should indeed go back to Burns’s house and wipe down the parts of the trailer they had touched. Noudga estimates that by this time it would have been the early hours of Saturday, May 11. When they got to the house, Burns gave Noudga a cloth and some dishwashing gloves and went to feed her cats and fetch a few things.

  Noudga wiped down the trailer hitch and chain and the locks on the trailer’s two side doors, anything she remembered touching the evening before. Burns opened the garage door, which gave them access to the back of the trailer, and pointed out to Noudga the areas she had touched when she had tried earlier to get in through its rear doors only to find them locked. When the cleanup was done, they returned to the hotel. It was still dark out.

  Back in their room, there was “more brainstorming, a lot of crying, hugging, consoling…[while] drinking copious amounts of wine,” says Noudga. “I think we ran out of wine by the time it got light out, but we were still in a lot of distress.”

  Later that day, they learned from Deepak Paradkar that Millard was being held at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre. The lawyer also advised Noudga against going to the courthouse where Millard would be charged that day. She says she was not aware at the time, or for months afterward, that Millard was not allowed to have contact with her.

  —

  IN CONTRAST TO CHRISTINA NOUDGA, Marlena Meneses, who testified before her, does not deny knowing about the events of May 2013 or the plans to steal a truck. She was at the Maple Gate house with Andrew Michalski while Millard and her boyfriend, Mark Smich, were discussing stealing a truck and looking at online ads. She later told Smich she thought the planned theft was a stupid idea, but he was determined to go ahead with it and didn’t respond to her concerns.

  On the night of the Ancaster test drive, May 6, Marlena went to visit her older sister Elizabeth. Her phone records show that she texted both Millard and Smich while they were near the Bosma home. Meneses remembers that the last time she spoke to her boyfriend that evening was just after 9 P.M., when Smich told her he was busy driving. She later became worried when she didn’t hear from him. “I knew they were going to go steal a truck,” she says. “I didn’t know if he got hurt or what was going on.” She texted Andrew Michalski, who told her not to worry and who then tried to contact Millard.

  “Yo,” he wrote just before 8 A.M. on Tuesday, May 7.

  Millard replied immediately. “Sup?”

  “Marlena was worried about Mark just wanted to figure out where he was.”

  “He’s with her.”

  “Proper?? she called me at 6 in the morning asking where he was, if I knew where you were. Everything be irie?” he says, using Jamaican slang.

  “Just swell. Marlena’s a child and worries too easily.”

  “I told her that you guys were fine and that it’s not the first time this has happened and won’t be the last.”

  After leaving the hangar that morning, Millard and Smich headed to Oakville, where they picked Meneses up at 8 A.M. Security video seized from her sister’s apartment building shows her taking an elevator to the lobby and leaving the building. Outside, Smich gets out of Millard’s Yukon, walks over to his girlfriend, and greets her before helping her into the car.

  The jury has seen this video during the testimony of Michael Plaxton, the forensic video analyst with the Hamilton Police, and it has also seen the surveillance photos of Meneses walking arm in arm with Smich following Millard’s arrest, as well as the many selfies she and her boyfriend took on his iPad. Now the jurors are finally getting to see and hear from Meneses in person. With her hennaed red hair, big eyes, heart-shaped face, and tiny body, she resembles a Japanese anime doll. She is wearing tight black pants and a black T-shirt covered by an open blue-and-white print blouse. Her very high black suede heels seem to be hurting her feet, causing her to limp ever so slightly as she makes her way to the witness stand. She sits down and smiles at the constable, who gives her water. Mark Smich watches her intently and Dellen Millard gives his now familiar half-smirk.

  Meneses and Smich went everywhere together, and they were often in Millard’s company. While Christina Noudga had university and a part-time job to occupy her, Meneses and Smich were unemployed and free to tag along with Millard. They made an unusual trio.

  Craig Fraser asks Meneses to describe the nature of the Smich–Millard relationship.

  “They were really close, like brothers. I would say Mark cared for Dellen more than he cared for other people,” she says. “He was in love with him.”

  “That’s a strong term, Ms. Meneses,” says Fraser. He asks her to elaborate.

  “You could just tell that was Mark’s feelings toward Dellen.”

  Meneses was nineteen when Tim Bosma was murdered. She had dropped out of high school after she met Smich, who was six years her senior. They met at a Tim Hortons in Oakville in early 2012. “I looked over at him. He gave me some look. His eyes were all big
and it was like he was in love with me,” she says. “My friend told me to go over and talk to him, and I did.”

  They were “dealing” for the first few weeks—which is “like when you’re with someone but you’re not fully dating, just getting to know each other”—and then she moved out of her mother’s home into Smich’s mother’s house, where she lived for the next year. She and Smich were often together night and day. Aside from his drug dealing, their sole source of income was doing odd jobs at the hangar. In return, Millard bought them food and clothes and paid for their phones.

  Meneses says she wasn’t entirely happy with the arrangement, that it was disgusting cleaning the washrooms the hangar construction team used. “A girl my age should get paid more than food and money on a phone. There were things I wanted to do, go to school, college.”

  It’s a statement that doesn’t quite ring true. As sweet as Meneses appears at times, she also seems aimless and unmotivated. She has racked up an impressive number of bad decisions for someone so young. And despite her protestations that she didn’t want Mark to steal, she regularly looked the other way when her boyfriend went out on thieving missions and dealt drugs.

  Meneses also only got a real job after Smich told her she had to start bringing in an income, at which point she went to work in the cold cuts section of a Metro grocery store. Millard had helped her put together a resumé, which stated that her career objective was “to be an awesome employee at your establishment.” She listed her defining characteristics as being cute, motivated, energetic, consistent, and attentive. Her work experience included cashier at Tim Hortons, car detailer at Millardair, and bartender at “Smichy’s”. Her references were Dellen Millard and Mark Smich.

  While Meneses readily acknowledges that she would go to Millard for advice and that he did her favours from time to time, she also says she never much cared for him and found him somewhat creepy. “I would say we were more acquaintances than actual friends,” she tells the court.

  Once Millard and Smich had picked up Meneses on the morning after Bosma was murdered, Millard drove them to Smich’s mother’s house a few minutes away.

  Fraser asks Meneses to describe the atmosphere in the car.

  “Very happy. They’re just really happy, saying they wanted to celebrate,” she says. “They just said that their mission went well.”

  There are gasps in the courtroom. Mary Bosma fights back tears, and her husband looks straight ahead. Smich and Millard are both sitting just a few feet away from them. Marlena Meneses doesn’t know where to look or what to do.

  —

  WHEN MENESES SAYS SHE learned from television news on the evening of Friday, May 10, that Millard had been arrested, she may be conflating memories. The arrest wasn’t announced until the next day, but the story of the missing man was at the top of the news Friday, including reports about one of the suspects’ “ambition” tattoo. Smich was there with her. “I freaked out,” Meneses says. “Like, ‘Why is your friend on the news, and why is he arrested for that?’ [Mark] was kind of like, ‘Oh, shit,’ and grabbed my phone and started calling people.”

  Meneses bites her lip and says she didn’t know who Smich called or why. All she knew was “that there were drugs in Dellen’s house and he wanted to get them out.” When she got home from work the next day, Smich told her a gun had been dropped off in a toolbox.

  “Did you ask where Mr. Bosma was?”

  “He told me Mr. Bosma was gone, gone.”

  “Did he say how Mr. Bosma was ‘gone, gone’?”

  “He just said Dell murdered him.”

  Mary Bosma is crying.

  “Did he tell you how Dellen Millard murdered him?”

  “That he shot him.”

  “Did he tell you where he was shot and when?”

  “He told me it was when they did the test drive.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you what he did?”

  “He told me he did nothing, that Dell did it all.”

  “Did you know of the incinerator at the time, Ms. Meneses?”

  Meneses replies that she’d seen the Eliminator at the hangar. She says Millard told her it was for animals at his farm. “I said, ‘But you don’t have any animals,’ and he kind of just left it at that.”

  When she heard on the news how the incinerator had been used, she asked Smich about it.

  Fraser asks what she did when she learned Tim Bosma was dead and incinerated.

  “Nothing,” she says. “I should have. I regret it. I could have stopped so much stuff. I should have.”

  Meneses says that when she suggested to her boyfriend that he talk to the police, he told her he just wanted to go to his sister’s wedding the following Sunday, May 19. They didn’t discuss it again.

  “Did you ever ask Mr. Smich why Mr. Bosma was shot, killed, and burned?”

  “No, I never asked.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to know,” she says, as if reliving the experience. “I was with the guy. I don’t want to know anything.”

  “Did Mark get rid of that gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he get rid of it?”

  “He told me he wrapped it in duct tape and buried it. He said somewhere in the forest,” says Meneses, but he wouldn’t tell her which forest or where it was.

  —

  “YOU LIVED BY A code,” says Nadir Sachak to Marlena Meneses in his cross-examination. “That code was to be forever faithful, loyal, and dutiful to your lover. Protect your lover….Your biggest thing is when someone is not faithful to a husband or lover.”

  Meneses agrees with Millard’s lawyer that this was what she felt and, despite everything, still believes.

  “In order to be with Mr. Smich, you had to accept that the person you loved could not have harmed a human being, would never shoot another human being, would not burn another human being,” says Sachak.

  “Yes,” she says, sniffling into a tissue. Over her three days on the witness stand, she often has to dab away her tears.

  “Your universe as you knew it would collapse. You gave up everything in your life to be with Mr. Smich, to be faithful to him, to be loyal to him?”

  “Yes.”

  Sachak shows pictures of Meneses and Smich at his sister’s wedding. She is wearing a strapless black dress with a hot pink shawl and matching pink shoes. Smich, for once, is dressed in clothes that fit. Although Meneses has just finished describing how upset the death of Tim Bosma made her, in the photos she and Smich are both smiling broadly.

  Sachak asks her if that’s how she grieves.

  She looks ashamed. In her version of events, she has cast herself in the best possible light, yet the pictures tell another story, one in which Marlena Meneses focuses only on an imagined future. In that world, she’s planning on having a baby and marrying Mark Smich, the drug dealer, not going back to school. She texts her sister Elizabeth from the reception, where she’s happily getting drunk and eating dinner. “Our wedding is next,” she writes.

  Having dealt a blow to Meneses’s credibility, Sachak will attempt to destroy the most important part of her testimony: her statement that in the car Millard and Smich were celebrating Bosma’s murder. He asks Meneses why she never mentioned that the two were celebrating until April 16, 2016, when she was interviewed by prosecutors in preparation for her April 21 court appearance. “That’s the first time in three years that you’ve ever made any reference to them celebrating,” he says. “Right?”

  Yes, says Meneses, but she insists she always told the police that Smich and Millard were happy, “not that they were celebrating, but they were very happy.” She will not budge, and she is not open to the possibility that she might be mistaken. Until this trial, it seems she could not admit to herself, let alone the world, that Mark Smich was celebrating the murder and incineration of another human being. Even as she cooperated with the police, Meneses continued to profe
ss her love for Smich and live by her code. For two years, she was faithful to him while he was in jail. And then she found a new boyfriend and her loyalties shifted. The code no longer applied to Mark Smich.

  THIRTEEN

  LETTERS

  Sandwiched between the testimonies of Marlena Meneses and Christina Noudga—the final witness for the Crown—there was one other witness to take the stand briefly at the Tim Bosma murder trial: Sergeant Kerry Duench of the Hamilton Police. Duench helped execute the search warrant at Noudga’s house after her arrest. She is there to testify that in the top drawer of Noudga’s bedside table, she found a series of letters that appeared to be written from jail by Dellen Millard. During Noudga’s testimony, those fifty letters are introduced as evidence. In a signed admission statement prepared by Millard’s lawyers, the accused has agreed that he wrote the letters.

  The letters are extremely valuable, because they show Millard’s attempts to fabricate alibis, tamper with witnesses, and suborn perjury. They also provide a glimpse inside his mind.

  Key details about the letters’ transmission are not presented in evidence; the jury hears only that they were delivered to Noudga by Madeleine Burns at meetings that took place once or twice a month, often at a Canyon Creek steakhouse near Noudga’s home. Over lunch or dinner, Noudga would collect her mail and give Burns letters to take to Millard. While Millard’s letters defied a court order barring him from communicating with his girlfriend, Noudga, until her arrest, was free to write to him. As the facilitator of this exchange, Burns violated a court order. She was never called to testify, however, nor has she been charged in relation to this case.

  Throughout the trial, many observers tweeted at journalists asking why Burns, who came to be known online by her nickname, Rabbit, was not facing charges and did not come to court to support her son. The reporters were not allowed to answer even though they knew that Burns was under subpoena and excluded from the courtroom, first as a possible Crown witness and later as a potential defence witness. If they did so, they would have risked being found in contempt of court for publishing critical information that the jury had not heard. Jurors did not know that Burns might testify. Nor did they know that her subpoena had been served by Detective Matt Kavanagh on January 4, 2016, at the Toronto West Court on the first day of Millard’s preliminary hearing to decide if he should stand trial for the murder of his father, Wayne. Two months later in March, when Justice Diane Oleskiw ruled that Millard would be committed for trial, no news media reported her decision.