Dark Ambition

by Ann Brocklehurst

  “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 r
eaction 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.

  NINE

  SUSPICIONS

  As much as Shane Schlatman was convinced his friend and patron couldn’t be involved in something as nefarious as the disappearance of Tim Bosma, another group of people had the opposite reaction when they heard the news of Dellen Millard’s arrest. One of these was a long-time employee of Millardair known for telling others that Millard was going to end up in jail. There were two stories he especially liked to recount, and they both took place in 2005.

  The first involved Wayne Millard’s plans to refurbish a Millardair DC-4 at Brantford Municipal Airport. On June 7, 2005, as Dellen was working on the plane, a seventy-four-year-old contractor fell from some scaffolding, hit his head, and died. As a result, Wayne was charged and sentenced to a $15,000 fine for “failing, as a supervisor, to ensure that the equipment, materials and protective devices” prescribed by law were provided. The prosecution disposition form, dated 2007, states that a “long time worker and friend of the owner of the company was working on an old airplane on a raised work platform. Platform did not have safety railings and the worker fell off, hit head on pavement and died. Company had ceased operations and had no assets. Supervisor was willing to step forward on behalf of company. Supervisor was current owner of what was left of company.”

  According to the Ontario Ministry of Labour accident report, the fall was witnessed by Dellen Millard and another Millardair contractor, who were also working on the plane. Years later, after Dellen was arrested, a family member of the late contractor contacted police to make sure that they were aware of the accident. The police looked into it and do not believe it to be suspicious.

  Curiously, though, just three months after the Brantford accident, Dellen was tied to another falling death. His girlfriend at the time leapt off a balcony in New York City in what was deemed by police to be a suicide. According to the official report made available by the New York Police Department, twenty-year-old Rebecca (not her real name) jumped after talking to her boyfriend on the phone. That boyfriend was Dellen Millard. Over the years, he told a number of friends and acquaintances that he had been having sex with Josie, the woman who appeared in the Millardair porn shoot, while talking to Rebecca. In a condolence message posted online, Millard wrote, “Rebecca, on the surface you were wild and strong; beneath that, sometimes fragile and troubled; but under all of it, infinitely beautiful, sweet and giving. I wish you were still alive, but that now seems not to be; so I wish you are happy, or at least no longer sad. Ever since we very first met, that is what I have always wished for you. Oh dear Rebecca; difficult as times have been, I feel the good outweighed the bad; I feel blessed to have had our lives touch.—love, Del.”

  Madeleine Burns also posted many strange and religiously-infused comments about Rebecca’s death. “Oh [Rebecca], Losing you now is unendurable, immeasurable. We knew each other for only a short period of time, but your beautiful and tender spirit touched my heart,” Burns wrote. “Rebecca, you are now at peace, surrounded with angelic joy, free from the depths of human suffering. I believe that those who love you will be reunited with you once again. Rebecca, it is just a matter of time. BLESS YOU, Madeleine”

  A few days later, as she arranged for a mass to be held at a church near her home, Burns wrote, “Darling Girl, today my prayer to OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN is that I may, through this veil of tears, find acceptance and one day be able to rejoice that you have returned home.

  ‘…THY WILL BE DONE…’ ”

  Over the next three years, she continued to post comments in a similar vein—saying, among other things, that Rebecca’s death had been “the most difficult and confusing time of [my] life.” Curiously, unlike other friends of Rebecca who shared their memories, Burns and her son were never acknowledged or thanked on the website by Rebecca’s parents.

  Although he had moved to New York to be with Rebecca, just before her death Millard returned to Toronto, where he soon became involved with a new woman, wooing her with helicopter rides, trips to see art installations, and talk of a future together. A year or two later, that relationship also ended badly, with both Millard and the woman accusing each other of assault. Police pressed charges against the woman, but not against Dellen Millard.

  For his next serious girlfriend, the young woman to whom he would eventually become engaged, Millard went with someone his mother recommended. Jennifer Spafford was the ballerina daughter of one of Burns’s childhood friends, and by all accounts she and Millard were a striking couple who impressed others with their good looks and outwardly happy relationship. Millard took her travelling to Europe and Asia, treating her to expensive spas and a lifestyle well beyond the reach of a ballet teacher. In 2010, they bought a house in Oakville for $600,000 in cash, which was registered in Spafford’s name and renovated by Javier Villada. Up until Millard’s arrest, she drove a car registered in her ex-fiancé’s name and lived in one of his condos. When Madeleine Burns was asked what her son’s fiancée was like, she replied that she was “a nice girl but expensive.” Apparently, even Millard
was shocked at the cost of the designer wedding dress friends say Spafford selected to go with the Tiffany engagement ring he gave her.

  Despite their break-up, Spafford and Millard remained friendly. On the night Wayne Millard was found dead, in November 2012, she was at the Maple Gate house with Dellen and his mother. And she and Millard texted back and forth the week Tim Bosma was murdered, arranging breakfast and yoga dates, and flirting. Along with Lisa Whidden and Christina Noudga, who was Millard’s official girlfriend at the time, that made Spafford love interest number three.

  Noudga was introduced into Millard’s circle by a former boyfriend who knew Andrew Michalski. She was also from Etobicoke, though she was slightly younger and attended a different school from most of the Millard entourage. Her parents were immigrants from Ukraine who had come to Canada around 1995, when Christina was three. The family lived modestly in a small bungalow. Dellen Millard offered Christina a taste of a more lavish lifestyle. “She really worshipped Dellen,” said a former acquaintance who didn’t want to be named. “I remember talking on the phone with her for, like, forty-five minutes, and she said how Dellen was a genius, the hardest working guy she’s ever met, going on about how great he was.”

  Noudga’s Facebook profile photo at the time of Millard’s arrest showed her wearing a red dress and embracing Millard, who is kissing her on the forehead. He is front and centre, while her face is hidden by her long dark hair. To show off her rich, good-looking, older boyfriend, Christina is willing to conceal her own face. Yet despite her devotion, she never received the full Jenn Spafford princess treatment. No house, no car, no engagement ring. Even as she took on an ever more central role in Millard’s life, she continued to live at home with her parents and work at part-time jobs to pay tuition.

  Until the trial, the news media often featured the same two photographs of Noudga. One, taken after Millard returned from the Baja race in 2011, shows a pretty young woman in a leather jacket holding Pedo the puppy and smiling sweetly down upon him; in the second, Noudga grins broadly and looks supermodel-esque. She’s dressed in a red jumpsuit, ready to go skydiving with Millard and a group of his identically clad friends and relatives, many of whom were visiting from France. Noudga’s YouTube account, under the name ChristinaEnn, shows an uglier side of her, however. In a video titled “Equadorian,” posted in 2007, she and her friend Karoline secretly film an Ecuadorean couple going for a walk in a snowy wooded area. “The Ecuadoreans are taking a trip,” says one of the girls in a whispery voiceover. “The Ecuadorean girl is very ugly. The guy is way too attractive to be with her.” As the couple starts walking up an icy hill, taking care to avoid falling, the narrator keeps up her commentary. She seems irritated that the Ecuadoreans haven’t slipped. “What the fuck is your problem? I live in fucking Canada,” she says. “Why the fuck haven’t they fallen?” Then she and her friend laugh about how the couple have spotted them and realize they’re being talked about and ridiculed. Christina and Karoline are mean girls.