Dellen Millard Found Guilty of Murdering His Father, His Third First-Degree Murder Conviction
An Ontario judge ruled that Millard shot Wayne Millard in the eye as he slept in 2012, a death first called a suicide, and that his alibi was a fabrication.
Published
The verdict turned on a phone. On Monday, September 24, 2018, Justice Maureen Forestell of the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto found Dellen Millard guilty of the first-degree murder of his father, Wayne Millard, a death that police had first recorded as a suicide. "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." Applause broke out in the packed courtroom. Millard, 33, cried softly in the prisoner's box. It was his third first-degree murder conviction in three years.
Wayne Millard, 71, a wealthy aviation businessman, was found dead in his bed at his Etobicoke home on November 29, 2012, with a bullet lodged in his brain. His son told police he had found him around 6 p.m. that day, that he had last seen him alive around noon the day before, and that he had spent the night at the house of his friend Mark Smich. He described his father as depressed, a drinker, and crushed by the strain of rebuilding the family aviation business. "He carried some great sadness with him throughout life that I never knew," he told investigators. Days after the death, he fired everyone at Millardair and wound the company down.
The case was reopened only after Millard was arrested for the 2013 murder of Tim Bosma, a 32-year-old Hamilton man killed after Millard took his truck for a test drive. By then he had also killed Laura Babcock, a 24-year-old Toronto woman he had been seeing, in July 2012, months before his father died. Millard and Smich were convicted of both murders and were serving life with no chance of parole for 50 years. Because of that notoriety, the Attorney General agreed to a defence request that the father's case be tried without a jury, and the trial ran in June 2018.
Forestell rejected large parts of the Crown's case, including its theory that Millard killed his father to protect an inheritance being spent on a new aircraft maintenance business; motive, she said, played no part in her decision. What decided it was the alibi. Phone records showed one of Millard's phones moving from Smich's house to his father's home around 1 a.m. on November 29 and staying there until shortly after 6 a.m., while his truck, credit card and other phone stayed behind at Smich's. "I do not believe the statement of Dellen Millard that he stayed at Mark's," she said. "I find it was fabricated to conceal he was involved in the death of his father." The court also accepted that Millard had bought the handgun found beside his father's body from a weapons dealer, and his DNA was on it. He did not testify.
The parents of Laura Babcock and Tim Bosma sat in the courtroom for the ruling. "There'll be not a day in our lives when the loss of Laura, Tim or Wayne won't be felt," Clayton Babcock, Laura's father, said outside. The Crown said it would ask for another 25 years of parole ineligibility, to be served after the 50 he already faced.
What the reports established. This account rests on the Canadian Press report of the verdict published by Global News on the day of the ruling; Justice Forestell's written decision was not opened. The sentence that followed in December 2018 and any later change to his parole ineligibility are not covered here.
Sources
- Dellen Millard found guilty of 1st-degree murder in death of his father, The Canadian Press via Global News (Liam Casey)