Dellen Millard and Mark Smich Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder in the Killing of Tim Bosma
A Hamilton jury convicted both men of killing the father who took them on a test drive of the truck he was selling; both got life with no parole for 25 years.
Published
Spectators had lined up for hours outside the John Sopinka Courthouse in Hamilton, Ontario, for most of four and a half months, sometimes shouting at each other over places in the line. On Friday, June 17, 2016, shortly after 3 p.m., the judge read the verdicts. The jury, out since Monday, found Dellen Millard, 30, of Toronto, and Mark Smich, 28, of Oakville, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Tim Bosma.
Bosma, a Hamilton man, had put his pickup truck up for sale. On the night of May 6, 2013, two men came down his driveway to take it for a test drive, and he went with them. He never came home. The Crown argued he was shot soon after he left the house, and that his body was later burned in a livestock incinerator. Prosecutors said the two men had planned all of it from the start: steal the truck, kill its owner, burn the body. Each man blamed the other. From the witness box Smich said Millard fired the gun and that he had only helped cover it up, and Millard's lawyer put the opposite version to him in cross-examination. The jury convicted both, which meant it found the killing planned and deliberate.
The Bosma family had sat in court every day of the trial, through the graphic testimony and the technical arguments alike. They gasped and wept as Millard's verdict was read. When the two men were brought back for sentencing, Millard looked straight at Sharlene Bosma, the widow, and shook his head. Neither man would say anything when Justice Andrew Goodman invited them to speak. The judge called what happened to Bosma "incomprehensible and unimaginable" and the two men's actions "despicable," then imposed the automatic sentence: life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Outside, Sharlene Bosma thanked the "village" that had carried her family through three years of waiting. "I'm always going to mourn what we're never going to have, what were never going to share together," she said. Smich's lawyer said there were "very strong grounds for appeal." Millard's lawyers would not say.
The case was not finished with Millard. He and Smich were still charged with first-degree murder in the death of Laura Babcock, a Toronto woman, and Millard was charged separately with murdering his own father, Wayne Millard. He was convicted of Babcock's murder in December 2017 and of his father's in September 2018.
What this story covers. The verdicts, the length of the trial and of the deliberations, the Crown's case, the two men's competing accounts, the sentencing, the judge's words, the family's reaction and Sharlene Bosma's statement come from CBC News's report of June 17, 2016. The later convictions are on this site's own stories of those verdicts. Bosma's age was not given in that report and is left out. At the time of this verdict Millard had been convicted of one murder; the Babcock and Wayne Millard charges were still untried. The father's murder charge was against Millard alone.