Wayne Millard’s body was discovered at his home on the evening of Thursday, November 29, 2012. The following Monday, Dellen texted Mark Smich, “Tomorrow I start firing people.”
“Tru. Well im still online. Mite run one last game,” his friend replied. “Whats the deal for tomoro? U busy i guess.”
“Yea organizing a funeral & the layoff of 15 employees & renegotiating deals with banks is a few days work. A lot’s happening fast. I’m getting sick too. yea at millardair, I’m sending everyone accept Shane home. noone knows yet.”
Shane would become an employee of Millard Properties, another family company. His first assignment for the new CEO was to change the locks at the hangar. “tomorrow morning John [Barnes] & his associates lose access to the hangar,” Dellen texted. “SPECIAL PROJECT: Either after hours tonight or early tomorrow morning Discreetly change the lock on the hangar entrance. I’ll want 3 keys. 1 for me, 1 for you, 1 spare to be kept in the key cabinet.”
As soon as that was done, Shane got back to work on Dellen’s cars with no further distractions. “Suzuki done. Seat back in Caddy and working. Olds is lock able again. Working on Vette now,” he reported in a text on the one-week anniversary of Wayne’s death. “I am very happy working for you.”
ON TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2013, the day after Tim Bosma’s murder, Arthur Jennings stopped by his daughter’s house to see his grandkids before going to work. He was having coffee when he noticed his son-in-law Shane Schlatman’s strange reaction to a text. It was from Dellen Millard, telling Shane not to come to work, which was very unusual. “He was expected to be at work no matter what,” Jennings later tells the court. “I was led to believe Dellen trusted Shane so much he wanted him there all the time. He could live there if he wanted. The look on Shane’s face was pretty shocked, surprised.”
Jennings had also been working at Millardair, on an unpaid internship arranged by Shane. It was the final requirement to get his certificate in supply-chain management, which he had gone back to school to study in late middle age. The school was supposed to have arranged a placement for Jennings, but it failed to come through, leaving him to get his own gig. The Millardair internship, which had begun in February, was essentially a scam where Jennings put in the hours required by the school while everybody ignored the fact that at Millardair there was no supply chain to manage.
After Jennings left his daughter and son-in-law’s house, he found the same text from Millard on his phone, which he had not yet checked that morning: “Airport politics no one goes to the hangar today, not even just to grab something.” It had been sent at 5:55 A.M.
That was fine with Jennings. Even before he received Millard’s text, he had decided to take the day off and enjoy the beautiful spring weather with his wife. He wanted to avoid all the menial tasks that awaited him at Millardair, including mopping the entire fifty thousand square feet of hangar floor. Neither Jennings nor Schlatman ever had any idea when the boss would show up or what he might want them to do. And when Millard did arrive, he was often in the company of Mark Smich and Mark’s girlfriend, Marlena Meneses, who would both be assigned odd jobs ranging from painting to cleaning the washrooms.
On the day before Jennings and Schlatman were told to stay away, it had been business (or more accurately lack of business) as usual at Millardair, with most of the hours devoted to building and outfitting a special trailer for Millard. While Millard wasn’t there that day, he did text Schlatman to let him know that he should stick around in the evening because Andrew Michalski was coming from Toronto to pick up his car. It had been at the hangar for five or six weeks, as Michalski’s licence had been suspended. Schlatman had done an oil change and reattached a bumper. Michalski’s friend Robert Bochenek—who, like Michalski, was living at Millard’s house—drove him there. While at the hangar, Bochenek and Michalski admired a Camaro belonging to Schlatman and made a short video of him revving the engine. By about 8 P.M., all three men were on their way home in their separate vehicles.
As his father-in-law had observed, Schlatman was shocked when Millard texted everyone not to come in to work on Tuesday. He messaged back in disbelief, “Including me?”
“Yes,” wrote Millard. “Take the day off.”
“Ok. Cya tomorrow then.”
“See you Wednesday.”
“Wednesday it is,” wrote Schlatman, anxiously adding, “Did I do something?”
“Haha not at all.”
“Ok I just don’t wanna do anything to cause you any headaches.”
“You are the relief to many of my headaches.”
“Well thanks for that. I do try.”
SHANE SCHLATMAN, A TALL, hefty guy with a sandy goatee, tells the court that in May 2013 he had known Dellen Millard for seven years. The two had met when Schlatman was working as a mechanic on the outskirts of Toronto and Millard would bring in his Jeep Wrangler TJ for servicing. Millard wanted to learn more about cars and approached Schlatman’s boss about renting a bay at his garage. When he was turned down, Millard proposed that Schlatman, who was a talented mechanic, come and work for him at Pearson Airport on Saturdays. That was in 2010, by which time there was no longer any active aviation business at the Pearson hangar. According to Schlatman, he maintained the various Millardair and Millard family vehicles and built a kit car for Dellen. Eventually he was hired on full-time, earning $31 an hour, ten dollars more than he’d gotten at his old job. Though Wayne Millard was in charge, Schlatman reported to Dellen alone. “I always was directed by Dell,” he says. “He would tell me what work to do, and I was not to listen to anyone else.”
In 2011, as Miliardair prepared to reactivate its aviation business, the company moved into two small rented hangars at Waterloo Airport as it waited for its new headquarters to be completed. Schlatman helped out by fabricating steel doors for the hangar, which opened in March 2012, and building and installing racking. But the bulk of his time was still spent on cars and personal projects for Dellen.
Dellen remained as uninterested as ever in the business Wayne was setting up for him and instead focused his ambitions on his farm. Along with planning to build his dream home at the rural property, Millard led Schlatman to believe that he too might have a family home there one day and work nearby in a special garage. In April 2013, Madeleine Burns applied on her son’s behalf for the zoning permission required to construct a four-thousand-square-foot drive shed to house Millard’s cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Millard and Schlatman had discussed a ninety-nine-year lease that would allow Schlatman to build a house on a slice of land carved out of the property.
The homes at the farm were to be constructed by Javier Villada, a contractor who had previously worked for Wayne and Dellen at Riverside Drive, Maple Gate Court, and Pearson and Waterloo airports. Whenever there was a big job, Villada would hire his four brothers—Alvaro, Francisco, Cesar, and Roberto—as well as his brothers-in-law, to work on an hourly basis. They had recently built the washrooms and office facilities at the new Waterloo hangar. Villada was also involved with Dellen in a company called Villada Homes, which, despite its name, was owned and run by Millard, with Villada occupying nothing more than a foreman role. The only homes the two partners had ever worked on were Millard’s properties and his ex-fiancée’s house in Oakville. But Villada, a burly man of fifty, still dreamed of building a gated community country estate at the Millard farm.
He even allowed his pay to be cut to $22 per hour from $27, a pittance in real estate–crazy, renovation-mad Toronto. Villada, who by all accounts is a good contractor, should have easily been able to find work elsewhere, but he stuck it out with Dellen. Over the years, his relationship with the Millards had evolved into something almost feudal in nature. He not only did work for the family, but also lived in one of the Riverside Drive apartments and made himself available around the clock, seven days a week. After he borrowed $9,000 from Dellen to return home to Colombia for a family visit, the two argued about how much had been worked off and paid back. As if that were not enough, Villada had an arrangement to lease Millard’s gas- guzzling red Dodge Ram from him for $450 per month. Yet even for this substantial fee, he would get last-minute requests from Millard to use the pickup.
One of these came on Saturday, May 4, 2013. “I believe Dellen called me to ask me to switch cars,” Villada tells the court. The exchange was made at five or six in the evening in front of the Sears store at Sherway Gardens mall in the west end of Toronto. Millard took the red truck and gave Villada his Yukon to keep for at least a week. But then, later that night, Millard changed his mind. He and his girlfriend, Christina Noudga, showed up at Riverside Drive with a white van owned by Millardair. They left the van with Villada and took back the Yukon.
While he was at Riverside that night, Millard asked to see an apartment Villada was custom renovating for him, which included extra-high kitchen counters for his comfort. The next day, Sunday, Millard texted Villada requesting that he check inside the white van for an item Millard had forgotten. On Monday, Millard gave Villada $900 in back pay while he was working at widening the driveway at Maple Gate. Then on Tuesday, Villada received the same text sent to Schlatman and Jennings, warning him to stay away from the hangar where he had not been in weeks.
WHEN JENNINGS RETURNED TO work on Wednesday, May 8, he brought coffee and doughnuts for himself and Shane. They chatted briefly and put their lunch boxes away. As he crossed the hangar floor, Jennings was stunned to see the truck he had seen on TV the evening before. It was sitting in the middle of the hangar on a green tarp. As a truck aficionado, Jennings immediately recognized the chrome and steel running boards from the news report about Tim Bosma’s disappearance. “My exact words to myself were, ‘Oh my God, could that be the truck?’ ” he tells the court. “Except for the back bench seat, everything else was out of it,” including the licence plates. There were some spray-paint cans on the tarp.
Because the truck made him “uncomfortable,” Jennings stayed away from it. He didn’t discuss it with Schlatman, who seemed unperturbed. Schlatman was preparing the vehicle to be painted red at a body shop north of Toronto. Millard had told the shop’s owner, Tony Diciano, that it was a rush job. He wanted it done by Friday, but despite the fact that Millard and his family were long-time customers, Diciano said he would need the weekend. At Millard’s request, Schlatman was stripping away the truck’s emblems, lights, and any other bits and pieces that would get in the way of painting.
Sometime around midday, Spencer Hussey stopped by the hangar. He was a baby-faced young aviation enthusiast who, before Wayne’s death, had been employed at the short-lived Millardair MRO. After he was laid off, he picked up some part-time work fixing cars and doing other odd jobs at the hangar and the farm. Working for $12.50 an hour was Hussey’s way of keeping in Dellen’s good graces. He didn’t even complain when Millard made him drive all the way to Toronto to pick up his paycheques. Like Javier Villada, Hussey was counting on Millard’s help to make his dreams come true. He had a plan to turn the hangar into an FBO, or fixed base of operations—a hotel for planes, as the hangar crew described it. While this was not as specialized or interesting a business as the MRO, or airplane garage, in which Wayne Millard had invested millions, it was better than nothing.
Throughout April 2013, Hussey had been arranging meetings with potential FBO clients and business partners, ranging from Bearskin Airlines to Esso. He kept Dellen Millard up to date with a stream of enthusiastic text messages and requests for meetings. At 7:53 on the morning after Tim Bosma disappeared, Millard replied to one of Hussey’s texts: “Haven’t forgotten about you, just haven’t had a brake [sic] yet.” A few hours later, he messaged again, asking Hussey to meet him at the airport the next day at noon.
Unlike Jennings, Hussey had not heard the news about Tim Bosma’s disappearance, so he didn’t think twice about the truck at the hangar. When he asked casually where it came from, Schlatman told him Dell had bought it in Kitchener. At his meeting with Millard, Hussey didn’t raise the topic. He remembers thinking Millard looked tired, with bags under his eyes, while his hair, which “he usually styled in some way, was just kind of thrown over.” Hussey and Millard arranged another meeting for two days later, on Friday, May 10, with two other potential partners.
Later that afternoon, Schlatman tried, at Millard’s request, to remove the windshield from Millard’s red Dodge Ram truck, the one they had taken to Mexico two years earlier. To assist with this task, which he had never carried out before, the mechanic had ordered a special windshield removal kit, which was promptly delivered by nearby NAPA Auto Parts. Schlatman was a good customer, buying thousands of dollars’ worth of parts every month. This, though, was his first purchase of a windshield kit. It was also the only one the NAPA sales rep had ever sold in his five years on the job.
The kit turned out to be a dud. Schlatman couldn’t figure out how to work it and eventually gave up, leaving the windshield on the red truck intact. He tells the court that Millard never explained why he wanted the windshield removed and that he never asked. When Schlatman inquired as to how the black truck had gotten to the hangar when it had no front seats, Millard said he’d driven it while sitting on a pail. According to Schlatman, that was as far as the conversation went. It was a similar kind of explanation to the one Jennings received when, earlier in his internship, he had wondered aloud about the presence in the hangar of vehicles with their interiors stripped out and was told that Millard was highly allergic to mould. “It’s strange to understand,” Jennings tells the court. “I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to.”
IGNORING WEIRD GOINGS-ON WAS a prerequisite for working at Millardair. When Dellen bought a $60,000 excavator, took it for a joyride, and blew out the engine, leaving it stuck in a swamp, Schlatman’s reaction, he tells the court, was, “That’s Dell.” He and Hussey headed out to the farm to help remove the machine from the mud. They tried towing it out using a Bobcat, failed, switched to a snowmobile and, not surprisingly, failed again. When he finally realized this approach wasn’t going to work, Schlatman attempted the unsuccessful “engine swap” witnessed by Chaz Main. In the end, Millard’s mechanic had to call in backup in the form of another excavator, which was used to pull the damaged engine out and replace it with a new one. Only then could the excavator finally be driven out of the swamp, where it had been stuck for months.
Nor was Dellen the only Millard handing out strange work assignments. When Wayne was alive, staff might arrive at Millardair only to be told their job that day was transporting barrels filled with oil and kerosene to the barn on Dellen’s farm for storage. On another occasion, employees were instructed to remove straw from the barn and spread it on the fields. Spencer Hussey thought they were doing it because Dell wanted to convert the barn into a house, while Javier Villada was told it was because the straw was a fire hazard. There was never an explanation that satisfied everyone.
Yet all this paled in comparison to the project that occupied Schlatman for several weeks during the spring and summer of 2012. Dellen had asked him to build a homemade incinerator. At Millard’s request, he welded together three fifty-gallon green steel drums on a steel base. The device, which is shown to the court during Schlatman’s testimony, looks like a high school student’s entry in a science competition to build your own rocket ship.
“Whose idea was it to build this thing?” asks prosecutor Craig Fraser.
“That was Dell’s,” says Schlatman. He explains that Millard planned to use it to burn garbage.
“Did you ever use it for garbage?” Fraser asks.
“I didn’t, no.”
“Did Mr. Millard use it for garbage?”
“I do believe he tried, but it didn’t work very well.”
“Do you know what kinds of garbage would be burned?”
“From Riverside and Maple Gate. There was a lot of garbage produced from those properties. He wanted some way to dispose of it cheaper and quicker.”
It was a preposterous story. Millard’s residential properties all had regular city garbage, recycling, and compost collection. The idea that it made sense to drive more than one hundred kilometres to dispose of normal household waste in a homemade incinerator was beyond belief. Yet according to his testimony, Schlatman never so much as raised an eyebrow at the plan, even when he almost caused a serious accident. “Having to wash the barrels out real well. Had small fireball out of one barrel,” Schlatman texted Millard on May 25, 2012. “Luckily had barrel facing out overhead door so No prob other than dirty underwear! Lol.”
“Haha, shame I missed it,” Millard wrote back. “So no incinerator today?”
“No lookin like monday it will be done.”
On Monday, Schlatman and Millard exchanged more texts. “That’s the idea,” wrote Millard regarding a photo they had been looking at. “needs double the number of vents, and a guard to prevent egress of large embers and light.”
Then Millard messaged his friend Mark Smich about getting together that evening: “We go do incinerator, cool?”
“Yo I’m down bro. I would even say come sooner then that. Then we can chill and talk about other shit as well.”
Schlatman had fixed up a trailer for Millard to tow the incinerator from the hangar to the farm for its test. Whatever happened next was not documented at the trial, but the text messages available indicate that it was not a success. Millard asked Schlatman to make still more modifications. Schlatman promised that he would get to it as soon as possible but said he was being delayed by Wayne, who had asked him to measure the hanger.
When that task was complete, he texted Dellen about the incinerator. “Did you want existing air holes covered or leave them and add more?”
“If the new guards cover the old holes, leave em. if not, fill em,” Dellen instructed.
“Ok guards will cover.”
“Great, don’t forget handles for easy moving,” said Millard.
Two days later, Schlatman asked, “Incinerator up to snuff now?” Presumably it wasn’t, because by June 18, after a month of experimentation, Millard finally gave up on homemade devices and instructed his mechanic to research professionally manufactured livestock incinerators.
“Cost on small 250 lb [capacity] incinerator is $11,390,” Schlatman texted Millard the next day. “Next model is 500 lb and sells for $13,440. Tax and Shipping extra.”
“Interesting, double capacity for 18% higher cost,” said Millard. “And they run off propane?”
Schlatman confirmed that he was looking at the propane model.
“Put an order in for the larger one,” Millard instructed. “Use the red Visa.”
Millard’s story about why he needed an incinerator had shifted by this point, but Schlatman was satisfied with the new explanation: his boss was thinking of getting into the pet cremation business. Millard told him that his uncle, a veterinarian, wanted to cut the high cost of destroying animal carcasses in Toronto. He thought he could “help his uncle out and possibly pick up business from other vets in the area,” Schlatman tells the court. Millard, he says, was always looking for new ways to make money. It wasn’t up to him to question what kind of profit margins there were in pet incineration, or why Millard would find it a more desirable career than aviation.
In his usual manner, Schlatman just did what he was told. He ordered the Eliminator from its Canadian distributor, Tristar Dairy, Hog and Poultry, based in Grunthal, Manitoba. When it arrived at the hangar, he unboxed it and took photos on his phone. On July 9, 2012, he wrote to Bill Penner, the sales representative he had worked with: “Hi Bill, received the unit on Thursday. Wow, very impressive.” He had some problems getting the machine up and running, but after much back and forth with Tristar and the Georgia manufacturers, Schlatman finally succeeded. A six-hour test burn was conducted at the hangar, and Millard was instructed on how to operate the device. At his boss’s request, Schlatman also constructed a special trailer so the Eliminator would be mobile and outfitted it with a generator and a propane tank. When everything was ready, the incinerator was moved from the hangar to its new home in the barn at Millard’s farm. Just as he had photographed its arrival, Schlatman took pictures of its departure. On August 13, he sent another email to Penner: “BTW - SN 500 is working great now. Sounds awesome when the afterburner kicks in!!”
The Eliminator was paid for by Millardair, a purchase entered into the company books by Lisa Williams, a contract bookkeeper who originally met the Millards through Dellen’s uncle, Robert Burns. Burns’s veterinary clinic was next door to a computer and IT business owned by Williams and her husband. Williams tells the court that the incinerator receipt did not stand out to her, and she never made any inquiries about it. Somehow, however, her husband, Charles Dubien, who had installed the security system at the hangar, found out about the Eliminator and mentioned it to Dr. Burns, Dellen’s supposed business partner. Burns tells the court he was shocked by Dubien’s information. He had never once discussed going into the pet incineration business, with his nephew. He was completely satisfied with the carcass disposal company he had used for the past twenty-six years.
From Burns’s body language and tone, it is evident that he despises Millard. While Millard tries to make eye contact with his uncle as he walks into court, Burns refuses to look at him. “He’s my sister’s son,” he tells Tony Leitch. “Biologically, he’s my nephew.” Burns says he looked after Millard regularly from the time he was three, when Dellen’s parents split up, until he was about fifteen, but he describes their recent relationship as “distant.” His testimony, which is confined as closely as possible to details about the Eliminator, is interrupted twice for legal arguments. Burns spends less than half an hour on the stand and police escort him out of the courthouse, keeping photographers at bay.
ART JENNINGS AND HIS son-in-law had come to an unspoken agreement to all but ignore the strange activities at Millardair. But on Thursday, May 9, Jennings broke that pact. While Schlatman was otherwise occupied, Jennings took out his phone and snapped several pictures of the black Dodge Ram, including close-up photos of the VIN through the windshield. He then called Crime Stoppers, gave the operator the number’s last six digits, and asked her to check if it was the Bosma truck. “That’s all I can tell you right now,” he told her. “I will call you back if you check those VIN numbers.”
“I was pacing, going outside, having fifteen cigarettes. I was hoping beyond hope it was not the truck and Dell was not involved.… She said, ‘Yes, it is the truck. Where is it? Please tell us where it is.’ ” Because Crime Stoppers guarantees anonymity, it does not trace calls and is unable to do so. It relies on sources like Jennings who don’t want to go to the police but have information about a crime.
Jennings told the Crime Stoppers operator that he couldn’t tell her where the truck was and that he would call back later that day. “I went into shock. I went inside my pickup truck and vomited because I was that upset. I was upset for everybody.” Most of all, he says, he feared for his family.
Although he phoned his wife, Jennings still didn’t talk to his son-in-law. “I knew Shane and Dellen were so close that I didn’t want to cause a rift between them,” he says. At 4:30 P.M., he phoned Crime Stoppers back and they patched him through to the police. Again, Jennings refused to give them the truck’s location, this time saying he would get back to them the next day after talking to his family. He sent Shane a text asking him to stop by his house after work. His daughter was there as well as his wife. Shane arrived and blew up. He said he was going to quit Millardair the next day and then he left.
Whether at the family meeting or shortly after it, a storyline emerged, one that Schlatman says endured right up to the trial: that Millard might have inadvertently tangled himself up with real criminals. “I thought maybe he had got himself into getting a stolen truck,” Schlatman tells the court. “The Dell Millard I know, he’s a nice guy. I would have never connected him with this.”
Jennings’s version is similar. “My concern was, ‘What has Dell got himself into?’ I didn’t know how far up this went. I didn’t want to bring harm upon myself or my family. It was better just to stay off to the side and let’s see what happens.”
Although Schlatman denies it repeatedly on the witness stand, his text messages suggest that he spoke with Millard after talking to his father-in-law. Just before ten that same Thursday evening, Millard, referring to the Bosmas, texted Schlatman, “I can’t stop thinking about what that family’s going through.”
There is no record that Millard was replying to an earlier text from his mechanic, so Craig Fraser asks Schlatman what prompted that message if, as Schlatman claims, he had not talked to Millard about the Bosma truck. The witness can’t provide any kind of credible explanation for the texts between him and Millard that night. To hear him tell it, that first text from Millard arrived out of the blue, followed two hours later by another one about the truck: “I want to take it back, but I’m a little concerned about how that’s going to play out,” Millard wrote.
“Ya that’s a tough call man,” Schlatman replied. “Have you considered goin to cops? Tell em you bought this truck but you think its warm.”
“Hypothetically: if this is the same one, I’m in a lot of jeapordy: what truck?”
Fraser asks Schlatman what the last text from Millard means.
“I assumed he was playing dumb not knowing what truck I was talking about,” says Schlatman.
Another explanation is that Millard was feeding Schlatman his lines using the hangar code. He was telling Schlatman not to talk about the truck, that it was gone and had never been at the hangar. If anyone asked, all Schlatman had to say was “What truck?” It was okay to lie about it because Dellen was in jeopardy from the criminals setting him up, the same ones, no doubt, that his lawyer would later suggest were framing Millard. For Schlatman, this was justification enough for not telling anyone that Tim Bosma’s truck had been sitting in Dellen Millard’s hangar for at least two days.
ON FRIDAY MORNING, JENNINGS brought his son-in-law coffee and doughnuts, as if it were just a regular day. And in a sense it started out that way. The black truck was gone, the green tarp was gone, and the giant trailer that had been outside the hangar was also gone. “When I asked [Shane] where the truck was, I was told to mind my own business, stay out of it,” Jennings says. He did, however, see tracks on the floor leading to one of the main doors for planes. They stood out, because earlier that week Jennings had been ordered to mop the entire hangar floor, an assignment he clearly resented.
Although he had told the police he would call Friday morning, Jennings didn’t follow up. Instead, he and his son-in-law got to work on another trailer project for Millard, which Shane was adamant had to be done. Hussey stopped by for his meeting, at which Millard told him that all potential FBO partners would have to contribute $5,000 to the business. That was a significant amount for Hussey, who tells the court he was surprised by the demand. He left the hangar by 2 P.M., just before the police arrived.
Jennings also missed the police visit, as he was on a supply run to Home Depot. When he returned, he found his son-in-law and Millard talking. “Dell was looking at me. Shane would look at me, turn his head. They were having a heated discussion,” he says. Millard came over and told Jennings to get all his stuff and go home.
“That’s when I…found out that the police had been there,” Jennings testifies. “He wasn’t angry, just calm, same old Dell. It really had me confused.”
Jennings collected his tools, his golf cart, which he worked on when there was nothing else to do at the hangar, and a meat smoker. He gave his Millardair key fob back to Schlatman. “I felt like a mouse in a trap,” he says. “I didn’t know if someone was going to come in and whack me. I had no idea. I didn’t know what was going on. I packed up all my stuff, drove it home.”
After the police left the hangar, Millard told Schlatman he had done nothing wrong. As was his custom, Schlatman didn’t pose any uncomfortable questions. In the courtroom, Craig Fraser asks him why not.
“He had said he wanted to move the red Dodge pickup truck,” Schlatman answers, as if that makes sense.
“Was this immediately after the police left?” asks Fraser.
“Immediate-ish,” says Schlatman.
Fraser establishes that there had been no previous discussion about moving Millard’s red truck, the same one from which Schlatman was asked to remove the windshield.
Schlatman says Millard told him “he wanted to have a vehicle outside the hangar in case the hangar was locked down. I was under the impression that for some reason the police might be back and not allow him into the hangar.”
Schlatman quickly arranged for a friend who lived nearby to store the red truck. Millard drove it over and Schlatman followed in his black Dodge Caravan as the Waterloo Police surveillance unit watched their every move. The two men returned to the hangar in Schlatman’s van.
“Any discussion about the events of that day?” asks Fraser.
“He was leaving to go to the bank and to see a lawyer.”
Millard left in the Yukon, followed again by the surveillance team who would tail him up until his arrest.
“And that was the last discussion you had with Mr. Millard?”
“Yes.”
Schlatman tells the court he has not spoken to either Dellen Millard or Art Jennings since that day. Some time after he left the hangar, Jennings went to the police. “I wanted to be proactive, not reactive,” he testifies. “I didn’t want myself or son-in-law involved. And I knew we weren’t. I knew it was better to tell my story before they made me look like I was part of the crime, and I wasn’t. He wasn’t.”
WHEN THOMAS DUNGEY CROSS-EXAMINES Shane Schlatman, he suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly assumes the role of everybody’s favourite trial lawyer. The cross-examination takes place almost halfway through the trial in early April, at the point where most of the forensic evidence has been presented and a parade of highly anticipated witnesses, including the friends and girlfriends of Mark Smich and Dellen Millard, is about to begin. The Schlatman cross is an epic shaming that leaves the packed courtroom simultaneously riveted and uncomfortable. “Intense” is the word audience members whisper among themselves as they file out for the morning break. As common as this type of legal drama is on TV and in the movies, it’s exceptional in real life. And when it does happen, it’s a reminder that when it comes to public humiliation, the courtroom still trumps the internet.
Until now, Dungey has not spent nearly as much time at the podium as Millard’s lawyers, Ravin Pillay and Nadir Sachak. (Dungey’s co-counsel, Jennifer Trehearne, almost exclusively handled legal arguments in front of the judge.) But his brevity and liveliness have been much appreciated, as have the questions no one else asked. Why, for example, he wanted to know from Javier Villada, did Millard call his company “Villada Homes”? Villada replied that he had never really thought about it. Dungey was also sympathetic to witnesses the public liked and who were attacked by Millard’s team—Igor Tumanenko, the Israeli army officer who spotted the “ambition” tattoo, for example—and tough on witnesses who did not make a good impression on anyone but Millard’s lawyers.
In the latter category was Lisa Whidden, a real estate agent who sold a house for Millard and went on to become his lover. At the time of the Bosma murder, Whidden was helping him sell a condo in Toronto’s Distillery District, a neighbourhood known for its night life, high-rise views, and youngish inhabitants. There were problems because, while Millard had paid a deposit to the builder, he didn’t have ownership of the unit. He had neither paid off the balance nor obtained a mortgage, and was having difficulty raising the necessary funds. According to texts he sent to Whidden, he was in a real cash crunch.
Whidden, a strawberry blonde in a plaid dress who is seven years Millard’s senior, smiled at him as she walked back and forth to the witness stand. Though she was never the number one girlfriend, she was still loyal. When Tim Bosma was missing, she refused to talk to the police about texts Millard had sent her on May 10, 2013. Among other things, the messages said “i’m too hot, stay away” and “I think someone i work with has set me up.” The police had to handcuff a belligerent Whidden to prevent her from leaving with her phone, which was seized as evidence. She testified that the handcuffs made her bleed, seemingly expecting sympathy. When she told the court, for a second time, that she didn’t see the relevance of certain questions, the judge had to remind her, “Ma’am, it’s up to the jury and myself to decide what’s relevant.”
After Millard was arrested, another agent took over the sale of the condo from Whidden, who forwarded her contacts and helped out with an open house. In return, she received a commission. At first she said that it was $10,000 from Millard’s mother, but then she clarifies that it may have been a $7,000 cheque signed by Burns but from a real estate brokerage firm.
Dungey acted dumbfounded. “You just get a cheque in the mail, ten grand from his mother,” he said. “You’re dating a guy for a year, not selling anything, and you get $10,000?” It was a bit of a cheap shot, but it also addressed a recurring Dungey theme: that the Millard family seemed ready and willing to pay people off.
The topic crops up early on in Dungey’s cross-examination of Shane Schlatman, when he notes that the mechanic continued to work at full salary for Millardair right up until April 2014, even though there was no commercial activity at the hangar for most of the year. Should anyone have failed to pick up on Millardair’s tendency to skirt the tax laws, Dungey leans on the podium and looks at the jury in disbelief as Schlatman explains his duties: working on Dellen’s hobby cars, doing the occasional oil change, and taking vacations in Baja, all on the company dime. None of this had anything to do with aviation or actually benefited Millardair, Dungey suggests to Schlatman, who protests that a couple of the vehicles did indeed belong to Millardair.
As a defence lawyer cross-examining the Crown’s witnesses, Dungey can ask leading questions not permitted during the prosecution’s direct examination. He also has more latitude in the issues he can raise as long as it aids his client’s defence. The main goal of cross-examination in a trial like this is to use the prosecution’s witnesses to strengthen the defence’s theory of the case. For Dungey, the main narrative he is advancing is that Mark Smich, his hapless druggie of a client, was controlled and manipulated by the evil Millard. To this end, Schlatman is portrayed as an example of Millard’s handiwork: deluded, obedient, and forever loyal to his criminal master.
Dungey questions Schlatman about the time he was asked to remove the GPS from a Bobcat that arrived at the hangar out of nowhere one morning. It’s an example of the type of issue that the defence can raise but the prosecution can’t, and it lends credence to news reports from May 2013 that a chop shop was being run out of Millardair’s facilities.
“Do you not find that a little suspicious?” Dungey asks.
“Not really. He told me he purchased it.”
“Are you sort of closing your eyes here…when you take the GPS off it?”
Schlatman maintains he’s not. “He’s the guy with the money,” he says of Millard. “If he wants it, he can just go buy it.”
Schlatman essentially gives the same answer when asked about the appearance of a wood chipper, a Harley-Davidson, and a concrete floor polisher at Millardair.
“So your philosophy is ‘I just do what he tells me, no matter what it is’?” asks Dungey.
“Yes,” says Schlatman.
Dungey turns to the week of May 6 and Schlatman’s arrival at work on Wednesday. He asks him if he was surprised to see the black Dodge Ram truck with its interior stripped out.
“Yes.”
“How long do you think you spent looking inside?”
“Twenty seconds.”
“Didn’t see any unusual smudging on the dashboard?”
“No.”
Schlatman says Millard brushed him off when he tried to get information, so he didn’t persist. Instead, he just asked what should be done with the truck. “He wanted to paint it and we were going to modify the truck for more power and fuel economy,” says Schlatman. The plan was to take it and the trailer Schlatman was building to Baja later that month.
Dungey asks if Schlatman didn’t find it suspicious that Millard wanted to paint a stripped truck red and replace its perfectly good windshield, which would in effect change the VIN.
Schlatman says there are VINs in other places.
“Yeah, but unless there’s a real problem, that’s where they look,” says Dungey. “You’re not even going to ask, ‘Why am I taking it out?’ ”
Schlatman claims that not only did he not ask but also he wasn’t even curious. Although the disappearance of Tim Bosma and his truck was a huge story, he says he knew nothing about it because it’s not his habit to watch the news or listen to the radio. When he did find out, his reaction was, “Art had already gone to Crime Stoppers so the police are already aware.”
Dungey raises his voice and tells Schlatman that this is the same game he’s played with all the vehicles. “Why don’t you do your duty and call the police?” he asks.
“Friday, I talked to Dell,” says Schlatman. “He said [he] hadn’t done anything wrong. He was my friend. I believed him.”
“C’mon, Mr. Schlatman, you saw the VIN number….You use common sense, something’s going over.”
“At that time, common sense wasn’t a strong point with me,” says Schlatman, who is agitated now and raising his voice. “My brain was in a blur.”
“How about Mr. Bosma?” snaps Dungey. “Was that a blur?”
“I don’t know what you want me to answer. I was waiting to talk to Dell.”
“So Dell’s more important than the Bosmas and the missing person?”
“Maybe I didn’t do everything I should have.”
“No, Mr. Schlatman,” Dungey blasts him, “you didn’t do anything.”
He accuses the witness of acting as if Tim Bosma didn’t exist.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” says Schlatman. “The Dell I know would not be involved in something like this.” That is the rationalization he repeats over and over again.
Dungey tells Schlatman that his loyalty to Millard trumps all, which is why, three years later, he is still not speaking to his father-in-law, who Schlatman believes “ratted Dell out.”
“Your loyalty is so great, the hell with Bosma,” Dungey roars in righteous anger. “It’s just like the other vehicles. You turn a blind eye. You’re not going to question anything.”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“Whatever Dell wants, Dell gets,” shouts Dungey.
Schlatman answers with a muted yes.
Dungey asks him why he initially denied to the police that he helped move the red truck on the Friday afternoon. He says the only reason Schlatman eventually admitted it is that the officer who questioned him told him he could be charged with withholding. He was in a corner.
“I think I was more trying to protect myself,” Schlatman says.
A few minutes later Dungey delivers the final blast—“You don’t see anything, you don’t hear anything”—and Schlatman is excused from the witness box. Hank and Mary Bosma both look at him as he walks past on his way out of the room, but he doesn’t return their gaze. Outside the courthouse, he covers his face with a grey hoodie and gets into his van.
Social media erupts with praise for Dungey: finally, someone is holding a person accountable for the part he played in a tragic crime. Every story needs a hero avenger, and if the law won’t allow the Crown attorneys to ask the questions needed to elicit the truth, then so much the better if Dungey can. The emergence of Smich’s lawyer as the crowd pleaser at the Tim Bosma trial is just one of the peculiarities of the adversarial system, and an illustration of what can happen during a cutthroat defence.