Tim Bosma came home early from his mother's 60th birthday party on the evening of May 6, 2013, to clean his truck. He and his wife, Sharlene, had listed their Dodge Ram 3500 diesel pickup online for $24,000. Repairs over the previous year had cost them a great deal, and selling the truck would ease the strain on a young family that lived in a house Tim had built himself in Ancaster, part of Hamilton, Ontario.
Two men had arranged to see the truck that night. They arrived just after 9 p.m., about two hours later than they had said they would. "Who comes this late to see a truck?" Tim asked his wife. He wondered whether he should go along on the test drive. Sharlene told him yes, because they wanted the truck to come back. He left with a big smile and said he would be right back. She never saw him again.
The two men were Dellen Millard, 27, of Toronto, the heir to a family aviation business, and his close friend Mark Smich, 25, of Oakville. A jury would find three years later that they had planned from the start to take the truck and kill its owner. The search for Tim Bosma led investigators back to two earlier deaths: Laura Babcock, a young Toronto woman who had been missing for almost a year, and Millard's own father, Wayne, whose death had been recorded as a suicide. Dellen Millard now stands convicted of all three as first-degree murders.
Dellen Millard was the only child of Wayne Millard, a pilot who ran the family aviation company. The business, Millardair, was founded in 1963 and flew as a Canadian airline until it went bankrupt in 1990. It survived in the 1990s and 2000s as a maintenance and servicing firm. Wayne inherited it in 2006 and moved it into maintenance, repair and overhaul work, and by 2012 he had built a hangar worth millions of dollars at the Region of Waterloo International Airport. He planned to turn the operation into a fixed base operation, a kind of hotel and service station for private aircraft. Dellen was expected one day to take it over.
By his mid-twenties Millard had money of his own. He lived in his father's large home at 5 Maple Gate Court in Etobicoke, in Toronto's west end, a house a police officer later described as having at least ten bedrooms. About two years before his arrest he paid $835,000 in cash for a farm on Roseville Road in North Dumfries Township, near Ayr, south of Kitchener-Waterloo. His mother, Madeleine Burns, whom some reports call Madeleine Millard, lived in Kleinburg, north of Toronto.
His circle in 2012 included Smich; Smich's girlfriend, Marlena Meneses; and Millard's own girlfriend, Christina Noudga. Each of the three would later testify in court about him.
Laura Babcock grew up in Toronto's west end, the daughter of Clayton and Linda Babcock. Her father remembered her as happy and bubbly, a hard worker who could be the life of the party. He remembered Christmas presents she chose for him and evenings spent together listening to music and watching television. She also chafed at rules. The family argued with her about staying out late, about a midnight curfew on weeknights, and about new friends. At one point her parents changed the locks, though she still knew where a key was hidden. She was seeing a psychiatrist and struggling with her mental health. Prosecutors later said she was also struggling with cocaine use and, by June 2012, had begun working as an escort. Her parents did not know that. As her father put it at trial, it is not the first thing a daughter tells her father.
By June 2012 she had fallen out with her family and was moving from couch to couch with her dog, Lacey. Her former boyfriend Shawn Lerner lent her an iPad the week before she disappeared so she could look for an apartment. On June 30 she dropped Lacey and some money at her parents' house and told her father she was going on a trip with a man. It was the last time he spoke to her. "Every time I see the dog I think of her and of better times," he told the jury five years later.
Babcock and Millard had been romantically involved before he began dating Noudga, and the relationship had not entirely ended. Babcock told Noudga she was still sleeping with Millard, and Noudga was furious. In April 2012 Millard texted Noudga: "First I'm going to hurt her, then I'll make her leave." The Crown would call Babcock the odd woman out in a love triangle.
On June 30 Babcock and Millard exchanged texts. Two days later, on July 2, Millard bought a handgun from a man named Matthew Ward-Jackson. In early July the two called or texted each other more than 100 times over three days. On July 3 phone records placed them together near a subway station, and that evening Millard's, Smich's and Babcock's phones were all at or near the Maple Gate house. At 7:03 p.m. Babcock's phone made its last outgoing call, to her own voicemail. The phone has never been found.
What happened next was pieced together from receipts, photographs and devices. On July 4 Millard bought a king-sized mattress at a Sleep Country store for $2,475.73 and asked for rush delivery. That same day Babcock's iPad was plugged into Millard's computer and renamed "Mark's iPad," and Millard sent Smich a photograph of a large object wrapped in a blue tarp, which the Crown said was her body. The next day a commercial animal incinerator called "The Eliminator," bought for about $15,000 after a failed attempt to have Millard's mechanic build one, was delivered. On July 23 Millard told Smich the machine had run its warm-up and was "ready for meat." A screenshot on his phone that day showed an internet search for the temperature at which cremation is done. Photographs showed Smich standing in front of the incinerator with its door open and flames pouring out, and what two experts said were bones inside; the pictures were too poor for them to say whether the bones were human. That night lyrics were written on Babcock's iPad, and a video recorded in Millard's basement showed Smich performing them as a rap about a woman's body and her phone. Two witnesses said Smich told them the song was true.
Lerner received his last text from her on July 1. He noticed that her last eight phone calls had gone to Millard, and two weeks later he filed a missing person report. Weeks after that he confronted Millard at a coffee shop in Mississauga. Millard told him Babcock was addicted to drugs and had "got mixed up with the wrong type of people," and denied having been sexually involved with her. For almost a year the case went nowhere.
On the night of November 28, 2012, Wayne Millard, 71, was on the phone with his girlfriend, Janet Campbell, into the early hours of the next morning. Shortly before 6 p.m. on November 29, by his own account, Dellen Millard found his father dead in his bed at Maple Gate Court. Wayne had a single gunshot wound to the eye. A loaded .32-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver lay beside the bed with one round fired.
The first response treated the death as a coroner's case of sudden death, not a homicide, and that shaped everything that followed. No search warrant was obtained. The blood-soaked pillow under Wayne's head was never forensically tested, nor was a dark, sooty mark on it that one officer would later say might have been gunshot residue. The blankets and the bloody bag in which the gun was found went untested. The gun was moved before it was photographed. The police camera at the scene ran out of batteries after about six minutes of video.
Sergeant Richard Nimmo, one of the first officers there, noticed things he would describe years later. Wayne's wife, Madeleine Burns, was distraught and crying. Dellen showed no obvious emotion, though his father's body lay a few metres away. When Nimmo told him, as he sat in his car with his dog, that police had found a gun, Dellen asked whether it was a revolver. Nimmo said nobody had mentioned a revolver.
At a police station that night Dellen gave a long recorded interview. He described his father as stressed about the business, drinking heavily, in pain and depressed, a man who "carried some great sadness" that he never shared with his son. He told police he had last seen his father the afternoon before and had spent the night at Mark Smich's house in Oakville. By December 1 the coroner had ruled the death a suicide and police closed the file. Wayne Millard was cremated about a week later. In the obituary Dellen wrote that his father "was a good man in a careless world."
Within days of the death Dellen laid off most of Millardair's employees and cancelled the company's Transport Canada certification, which it needed to operate at the airport. He also texted his girlfriend that in his last conversation with his father he had told him the company's financial troubles were his doing and that he was a failure.
Tim Bosma was 32. He and Sharlene had married at Carmen's Banquet Hall in Hamilton and had a young daughter, who was five by the time of the trial. His parents, Hank and Mary Bosma, lived nearby. Sharlene described him as loving and sometimes funny. The judge at his killers' trial would call him an "innocent, decent, hardworking family man." He had never met Millard or Smich.
The day before Bosma vanished, on May 5, 2013, two men test-drove a truck being sold by a man in Toronto. The owner found them suspicious, and after Bosma's disappearance police said the same two men were suspected.
On May 6, at about 9:20 p.m., a camera near the Bosma home recorded a truck like Tim's heading toward Brantford, followed by an SUV like Millard's. At about 10 p.m. another camera near Oak Park Road on the outskirts of Brantford showed both vehicles stopping for about ten minutes before moving on. The Crown said Bosma was shot at close range as he sat in the passenger seat of his own truck. Investigators later found a shattered front passenger window, a spent .380 cartridge case, and Bosma's blood and gunshot residue throughout the cab.
Shortly after midnight on May 7, a security camera recorded a truck pulling a trailer, closely followed by an SUV. At 1:13 a.m. a camera inside the Millardair hangar at the Waterloo airport showed two men walking across the floor, and at about 1:30 a.m. it recorded Millard, Smich and Millard's dog. At 1:44 a.m. it showed the incinerator, now mounted on a trailer, and a bright flash. A camera at a neighbouring business picked up a large flame at about the same time. At 8:17 a.m. Millardair employees received a text telling them not to come to the hangar that day. On May 8 employees saw an unfamiliar black pickup inside.
Hamilton police declared Bosma missing on May 7. On May 9 Sharlene stood before cameras and pleaded for his return. "It was just a truck, a stupid truck," she said. "You don't need him, but I do." Tips poured in, more than 300 within days and more than 700 by May 17. On May 10 police announced that Bosma's cellphone had been found in an industrial area on the edge of Brantford.
Late on May 10, Millard was arrested without incident while driving in Mississauga. Police announced the next day that he was charged with forcible confinement and theft over $5,000. On May 11 officers searched the Maple Gate house and taped off the hangar. On May 12, Mother's Day, Mary Bosma said her only wish was for her son to come home safe. That same day police found his truck inside an enclosed trailer in the driveway of Millard's mother's home in Kleinburg. The carpet and front seats had been stripped out, and charred seats were in the trailer.
On May 14 Hamilton police Chief Glenn De Caire said officers believed they had found Bosma's burned remains, that he had been targeted, and that he had likely died soon after he left home. On May 15 Millard appeared in court charged with first-degree murder. His lawyer at the time, Deepak Paradkar, said his client was "100 per cent not guilty." On May 16 police found the incinerator on the Roseville Road farm, where it had been moved into the bush. Investigators reported finding human bone fragments, a possible tooth and Bosma's blood inside. The bones were too badly burned for DNA testing; investigators believed they were his. On May 22, at a memorial service for Tim in the same hall where he and Sharlene had married, police announced a second arrest: Mark Smich. He was charged with first-degree murder the next day.
The case reached beyond Bosma almost at once. By May 17 Toronto police had reopened their files on Wayne Millard's death and on Laura Babcock's disappearance. Investigators found a motorcycle that had been stolen from a Toronto driveway in 2012 inside the hangar with its identification number removed. A digital video recorder holding the hangar footage was later found in Christina Noudga's bedroom. Millardair, a supplier said, had stopped taking orders. In September 2013 Toronto police, helped by Hamilton officers, returned to the farm in connection with Babcock.
On April 10, 2014, police announced new charges. Millard was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Laura Babcock and his father. Smich was charged with Babcock's murder. Noudga, then 21, was charged as an accessory after the fact in Bosma's death. In July 2014 the attorney general agreed to send Millard and Smich straight to trial in the Bosma case without a preliminary hearing.
Jury selection began in Hamilton on January 18, 2016, and the trial opened on February 1 at the John Sopinka Courthouse before Justice Andrew Goodman. Over four and a half months the Crown, whose team included prosecutor Craig Fraser, called 92 witnesses. Sharlene Bosma testified first. Millard's lawyer, Ravin Pillay, cross-examined her briefly; Smich's lawyer, Thomas Dungey, asked her nothing.
The Crown's theory was that the men had planned to steal a pickup and kill its owner, and that financial desperation lay behind it. Each accused blamed the other. Marlena Meneses, Smich's former girlfriend, told the jury in April that Smich had told her Millard shot Bosma, that the two men picked her up the morning after he vanished, and that she had tried to talk Smich out of the planned truck theft. "Mark cared for Dellen more than any other person," she said. Noudga testified that she wiped down the trailer that held the truck on the instruction of Millard's mother and did not think it was evidence, an answer that drew laughter in the courtroom. She said letters Millard wrote to her from jail had left her feeling played, and the Crown said Millard had urged her to get a key witness to change his story. "If he knew his words were going to get me a life sentence, he'd change them," one letter read.
In May Smich took the stand. He said Millard shot Bosma and looked "like a lunatic, like something came over him." He said he saw Bosma slumped over the dashboard and a bullet hole in the window, and that he helped cover up the crime out of fear. He admitted burying the gun but said he could not remember where. Millard's lawyer Nadir Sachak suggested that Smich had shot Bosma by accident during an attempted theft. Smich denied it. Millard did not testify or call a defence.
The jury did not hear everything. Justice Goodman excluded evidence that Millard bought a black-market handgun before the killing, more than 26,000 text messages from his phone, and any mention of illicit drugs. The jurors also did not know that both men were charged in Babcock's death.
The jury was sequestered on June 13. After five days, on June 17, 2016, it found both men guilty of first-degree murder, meaning the killing was planned and deliberate. Justice Goodman called what happened to Bosma "incomprehensible and unimaginable" and imposed the mandatory sentence of life without parole for 25 years. "I'm always going to mourn what we're never going to have, what were never going to share together," Sharlene Bosma said.
In late 2016, on the day her own trial was to begin, Noudga pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of obstructing justice. In an agreed statement of facts she admitted wiping fingerprints from the trailer hitch and door locks with Millard's mother and helping move the incinerator from a barn into the bush on the farm. She maintained that she had not known Bosma was dead, and the Crown accepted that. With credit for about four months in custody after her arrest and two years under house arrest, she was sentenced to time served plus one day.
The Babcock trial opened in Toronto in October 2017 before Justice Michael Code. Millard, by then 32, chose to act as his own lawyer, a rare decision in a first-degree murder case. Smich was represented by Dungey. In her opening Crown prosecutor Jill Cameron told the jurors that Babcock had been killed for being the odd woman out in a love triangle, and read them the April 2012 text about hurting her.
Clayton Babcock was the first witness. "Are you nervous?" Millard asked him. "No," he said. For about an hour Millard questioned him about his daughter's mental health and home life and asked whether he had known she worked as a prostitute, and whether he had ever hit her. He said no to both. The judge told Millard his questioning was too repetitive. Clayton Babcock said he had met Millard once, at his house, and that Millard had seemed decent.
Lerner described the iPad and the phone records and his meeting with Millard at the coffee shop. A Sleep Country salesman, Kulvinder Bassi, described the mattress sale; asked by Millard whether his customer had seemed under pressure, he said he could not tell. Retired Ontario Provincial Police detective Jim Falconer spent days walking jurors through the contents of seized computers and phones, evidence the judge called the most substantial of the trial. The incinerator photographs, the blue tarp image, the "BBQ" texts and the rap video were all shown. Babcock's iPad and her red bag had been found at Smich's house.
Millard's position was that he had not cared much about Noudga or her feud with Babcock, that he was seeing other women, and that his messages about Babcock had been meant to placate a jealous girlfriend. At one point he told the jury that Babcock was not dead. Smich's lawyer argued that his client had no reason to kill her. The jurors were not told that both men had already been convicted of murdering Tim Bosma.
On Saturday, December 16, 2017, the jury found both men guilty of first-degree murder. Millard turned in his chair, looked at Linda Babcock, and shook his head; she smiled. "Today's verdict really brings us little joy," Clayton Babcock said. "The loss of Laura is no easier today than when it was realized five years ago." On February 26, 2018, Justice Code called Millard "profoundly amoral and dangerous" and found Smich an "enthusiastic" participant. He ordered both new 25-year terms to run consecutively to the Bosma sentences, for 50 years without parole. Cameron said the pair had killed "for the thrill they needed." "Justice has been served to the murderers of our cherished daughter Laura," Clayton Babcock said.
Millard's third trial began in Toronto in June 2018. Because of the publicity from his earlier trials, he asked to be tried by a judge alone, and the attorney general agreed. Justice John McMahon, the case management judge, said the arrangement would ensure a fair trial. Justice Maureen Forestell presided. Pillay again represented Millard; Cameron and Ken Lockhart prosecuted. Millard pleaded not guilty.
The Crown said text messages and phone records showed Millard had bought the .32 revolver on July 2, 2012, and that his DNA, not his father's, was on its grip. The officers who had handled the 2012 scene testified about the evidence never tested and the gun moved before photographs. Phone records, entered by agreement, told the rest. Millard had two phones. Just after midnight on November 29 both were near Smich's house in Oakville. Just after 1 a.m. one of them called an Oakville taxi company. By 6:11 a.m. that phone was pinging a tower near Maple Gate Court, and it had called a Toronto taxi company that morning. In the afternoon it was near the Waterloo airport, and just before 6 p.m. it was back near his father's house, about when he said he found the body. The other phone, along with his truck and his credit card, had stayed at Smich's house.
Meneses testified that in 2012 Millard once slept at Smich's home, which he had never done before, and that he left for several hours saying he was "going on a date," leaving a phone behind. Millard's uncle, Robert Burns, a veterinarian who said he kept his distance from his nephew, read out Millard's phone number for the court; it matched the phone near Maple Gate that morning. A crime scene reconstructionist, Detective Constable Grant Sutherland, said he did not believe Wayne Millard had shot himself; the defence called his methods unsound. Millard did not testify. His defence was that his father, troubled and drinking, had taken his own life.
On September 24, 2018, Justice Forestell convicted him of first-degree murder. "I am satisfied that Dellen Millard killed his father by shooting him in the left eye as he slept," she said. "I can find no theory consistent with innocence." The case turned on a lie. She did not believe his statement that he had stayed at Smich's house and found that the account had been made up to hide his part in the death. She rejected the Crown's suggested motive, that he killed to stop his inheritance being spent on the new business, and said it played no role in her decision. Applause broke out in the courtroom. Millard cried softly.
In December 2018 Forestell imposed a third life sentence and made its 25-year parole ineligibility consecutive, for 75 years in all. Millard would not be eligible to apply until 2088, when he would be 102; the Crown said it was the longest parole ineligibility period in Ontario by five years. Pillay had called a third consecutive term "extraordinarily harsh and excessive." The judge said Millard was capable of gaining the trust of friends, relatives and strangers and had used that trust "as a vehicle for planned and deliberate killings," and that any hope of rehabilitation was "so faint" it played little part. Detective Sergeant Mike Carbone said Millard could move from "a very normal person" to "a very diabolical and violent individual." Jill Cameron called it "a great day for justice."
In 2022 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in another case that stacking parole ineligibility periods for multiple murders was unconstitutional. The ruling reached all three of Millard's sentences.
Millard, representing himself and appearing by video from prison, argued his appeal in the Wayne Millard case in March 2023. He said the verdict was unreasonable; that the trial judge had leaned on Meneses, whom she herself had called a dangerous witness; and that the Crown had never fixed the time of death. He asked why he would have kept carrying a phone that placed him at the house while leaving another behind as an alibi. He called the Bosma killing "careless and sloppy" and said he would have taken far more care to hide evidence. On March 17, 2023, minutes after he finished, the court dismissed the appeal. "This court sees no errors in the reasons of the trial judge," Justice Eileen Gillese said for the panel. In written reasons it found that the gun bore Dellen Millard's DNA but not his father's and that, with his presence near the house and the false alibi, the evidence formed "an overwhelming foundation" for the verdict. It upheld the life sentence but struck the stacked parole order, so that Millard can apply for parole after 25 years. "We have no hope," Linda Babcock said.
On June 14, 2023, the court dismissed both men's appeals in the Bosma case. Smich's lawyer, Richard Litkowski, had argued that the jury was not properly told to weigh the case against each accused separately. Millard said he had been cast as the "perfect villain" and was too meticulous to commit so careless a murder. Gillese, writing for the panel, called the trial "hard-fought, lengthy, and contentious" and found that Goodman had dealt with the closing arguments in a fair and balanced way. The next day Justice David Paciocco, for the court, upheld both men's convictions for Babcock's murder. He rejected Millard's complaint that Code should have adjourned the trial so he could find a lawyer, noting that Millard could afford counsel and had chosen to represent himself, and found enough evidence linking Millard to Smich's lyrics, written when the two were together. "Nothing really changes," Linda Babcock said. "She's still gone every day." Litkowski said leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was very likely to be sought.
Smich is serving two life sentences. He was not charged in Wayne Millard's death. In May 2021 he was moved from Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison near Kingston, to the medium-security Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst. The Babcock and Bosma families learned of it later and protested, and Premier Doug Ford said he was "totally disgusted."
Because Laura Babcock's body was never found, the coroner could not issue a death certificate. Her family spent about 18 months fighting for one; the effort began when a voter registration card arrived in her name after the verdict. Ontario amended its Vital Statistics Act so that a court can declare dead a person who disappeared in circumstances of peril. The change, known as Laura's Law, took effect in December 2019, and Premier Ford delivered the certificate to her parents himself. Linda Babcock said it meant her daughter's killers could no longer say they had been jailed for killing someone who was not legally dead.
Sharlene Bosma, for her part, founded Tim's Tribute, announced in August 2013, a charity that helps the families of homicide victims with immediate costs such as funerals. A fundraiser in Copetown in June 2013 had raised $191,000 for the Bosma family. The Roseville Road farm was sold to a landscaping company in February 2014, and in 2015 the former Millardair hangar was to be leased to a charter company.
Three first-degree murder convictions are proven in law and have survived appeal. Much else is less certain. No court has decided who fired the shot that killed Tim Bosma; Smich said Millard did, Millard's lawyers suggested Smich did, and the jury convicted both of planned murder without having to choose. In the Babcock case the incinerator account rests on circumstantial evidence the jury accepted; her remains were never recovered, and experts could not say the bones in the photographs were human. Why Wayne Millard was killed has never been settled; the trial judge expressly rejected the inheritance motive the Crown proposed, and press reports that he killed to protect his fortune go further than her findings. Christina Noudga admitted destroying evidence but was never found to have known of any killing. Millard's mother was never charged with anything in the sources reviewed. Millard has never admitted any of the killings.
As of October 2026, Millard is serving three life sentences. With the stacked periods removed, the earliest he can apply for parole is about 2038, 25 years after his arrest for Tim Bosma's murder. No source reviewed reports that the Supreme Court of Canada heard any further appeal by either man.
1963: Millardair founded; it flies as an airline until its 1990 bankruptcy.
2006: Wayne Millard inherits the company.
April 2012: Millard texts Christina Noudga that he will hurt Laura Babcock and make her leave.
June 30, 2012: Babcock leaves her dog with her parents and speaks to her father for the last time.
July 2, 2012: Millard buys a handgun.
July 3, 2012: Babcock's last outgoing call, 7:03 p.m.
July 4-5, 2012: Mattress purchase, tarp photograph, renamed iPad; the incinerator is delivered.
July 23, 2012: Millard tells Smich the incinerator is ready.
November 29, 2012: Wayne Millard found dead at Maple Gate Court; ruled a suicide by December 1.
May 5, 2013: Two men test-drive a truck in Toronto; the owner finds them suspicious.
May 6-7, 2013: Tim Bosma leaves on a test drive and disappears; a flash is recorded at the hangar at 1:44 a.m.
May 10, 2013: Millard arrested in Mississauga; Bosma's cellphone found near Brantford.
May 12, 2013: Bosma's truck found in a trailer at Millard's mother's home in Kleinburg.
May 15, 2013: Millard charged with first-degree murder.
May 16, 2013: Incinerator found on the Roseville Road farm.
May 22, 2013: Smich arrested on the day of Tim Bosma's memorial.
April 10, 2014: Millard charged in the deaths of Babcock and his father; Smich charged in Babcock's; Noudga charged as an accessory.
February 1, 2016: Bosma trial opens in Hamilton.
June 17, 2016: Millard and Smich convicted of Bosma's murder.
Late 2016: Noudga pleads guilty to obstructing justice.
December 16, 2017: Both men convicted of Babcock's murder.
February 26, 2018: Babcock sentences made consecutive; 50 years without parole.
September 24, 2018: Millard convicted of his father's murder.
December 2018: Third life sentence; parole ineligibility set at 75 years.
December 2019: Laura's Law takes effect; Babcock's parents receive her death certificate.
May 2021: Smich moved to Beaver Creek Institution.
2022: Supreme Court of Canada strikes down stacked parole ineligibility.
March 17, 2023: Appeal in Wayne Millard's case dismissed; stacked parole period removed.
June 14-15, 2023: Bosma and Babcock appeals dismissed.