They were also both friends of Laura Babcock, who vanished in the summer of 2012, almost a year before the murder of Tim Bosma. The disappearance did not receive media attention at the time, but things changed after Millard’s arrest. As soon as Babcock’s ex-boyfriend Shawn Lerner heard Millard’s name mentioned in connection with the Bosma case, he contacted Babcock’s parents, who then got in touch with the police. Babcock’s phone bill showed that the last eight calls she had made before she disappeared were to Dellen Millard.
In the view of the police, it wasn’t that surprising that Babcock would go missing of her own volition. Although she was a recent graduate of the University of Toronto in English and drama and came from a stable middle-class family, Babcock had experienced a lot of upheaval in the last few months before her disappearance. She was no longer the bubbly flautist who had joined the high school marching band, or the young woman who had charmed customers at the toy store where she worked part-time. She had had a mental health crisis, had combined recreational drugs with her prescription meds, and had been asked to leave her parents’ home. This caused the police to think of her as a possible runaway or a voluntary disappearance. According to Lerner, when he had originally brought Babcock’s phone bill and other information to their attention, the Toronto cops brushed him off and accused him of playing CSI.
He says the police even suggested to him that because he wasn’t a family member, he didn’t have the right to file a missing person report. The obvious inference was that they thought he was some kind of stalker, a perception supported by the fact that it was Lerner, the ex-boyfriend, and not Babcock’s parents, Clayton and Linda, who originally reported her missing, on July 14, 2012. Lerner has always been exceedingly diplomatic about the Babcock family’s handling of their daughter’s disappearance. He explains that because she was no longer living at home, her friends were naturally the first to note her prolonged absence. He emphasizes that the Babcocks notified the Toronto Police that their daughter was missing a few days after he did and were interviewed by detectives from 22 Division in Etobicoke, the same Toronto suburb where the Millards lived. When Babcock’s phone bill arrived in the mail, he says her parents shared it with both him and the police and asked the police to contact Dellen Millard.
But the police appear not to have acted on the phone information, and the Babcocks didn’t push further other than to repeat their request. They seem to have believed that ruffling police feathers could hinder rather than help the investigation. And despite the fact that Babcock had never disappeared for an extended period before, they had an almost irrational faith that nothing bad had happened to her. Perhaps, they thought, she had just left on some kind of adventure from which she would eventually return.
Lerner was more suspicious. Over the course of his dealings with the Toronto Police, he became convinced that once they heard about Babcock’s drug habit, they were less diligent. When he contacted Sergeant Stephen Woodhouse, the officer in charge of the investigation, to check if he had spoken to Dellen Millard, Woodhouse did not return his emails. Because Woodhouse’s voice mail was often full, Lerner was almost never able to leave a phone message, and on the rare occasion that he could, he says no one got back to him. (Later, in a May 2013 story in the National Post, Woodhouse stated that the original police investigators were not aware of the relationship between Babcock and Millard, and contended that her phone records were not brought to their attention at the time.)
Out of frustration, Lerner decided to contact Millard himself soon after Babcock’s disappearance. He got no response until he sent Millard a text saying he had Babcock’s phone bill and was wondering about her last eight calls with him. Millard responded immediately, suggesting they get together at once, as early as that afternoon. Lerner couldn’t make it until the next day, and the two men agreed to meet for coffee at a bookstore Starbucks west of Toronto. Millard was sipping a drink and leafing through magazines when Lerner arrived a few minutes late. Millard initially denied having spoken with Babcock, changing his story only when Lerner produced Babcock’s phone bill from his bag. Oh, yes, Millard then recalled, she had been looking for drugs.
Lerner pressed to find out more, but Millard cut the conversation short, saying he had to hurry to another engagement. After the meeting, Lerner says, he tried again to get Sergeant Woodhouse to talk to Millard and to trace the iPad that Lerner had loaned Babcock to help her look for work and a place to live. He had given it to her the last time they met, on June 26, 2012, at the food court in the Eaton Centre shopping mall in downtown Toronto.
By that point, the glowing, brown-haired girl-next-door, whom Lerner had dated for more than a year before they broke up in December 2011, had transformed into a skinny blonde who sometimes went by the name Elle Ryan. Not long after her split from Lerner, she had moved in with a new boyfriend. The relationship ended badly a few months later when she went to the police and had David Austerweil arrested for assault, theft under $5,000, and the sexual assault of a friend. The charges, which were dropped after Babcock vanished, stemmed from an incident that took place in February 2012. The Toronto Star reported that Austerweil, Babcock, and a friend of Babcock’s were taking a variety of drugs when the women started stripping and kissing each other for an online sex cam. According to Austerweil, Babcock was registered at the site, where anyone can sign up to perform live sex acts and receive payment.
Since graduating from university, Babcock had been at a loss about what to do with her life. The mental health problems she had fought against for years had begun to take over, and she went from doctor to doctor looking for a diagnosis and treatment. A few weeks before the sex cam incident and the arrest of Austerweil, Babcock had been caught shoplifting a lipstick from a Winners store in downtown Toronto. When security guards stopped her, she repeatedly banged the back of her head against the building’s exterior wall, causing the injury that Austerweil says police later blamed on him. His broken finger, he said, was the result of him hitting a wall in frustration after Babcock punched him repeatedly.
Her relationship with Austerweil over, Babcock moved from one friend’s home to another, sleeping on their couches and wearing out her welcome with her increasingly erratic behaviour. She felt she couldn’t go home because her parents had asked her to leave after she threatened her mother with a wooden spoon. In an effort to keep her safe, Lerner paid for Babcock to stay at the Days Inn, now a Howard Johnson, in the west end of the city. While it wasn’t the greatest accommodation or location, the hotel accepted dogs, and that was important for Babcock, whose small white Maltese, Lacey, accompanied her almost everywhere. A few days before she disappeared, Babcock dropped Lacey off at her parents’ house along with a shoebox full of cash.
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LAURA BABCOCK LIKED TO meet men through online dating sites. If they met with her approval, she would sometimes invite them out again with friends, including Christina Noudga and Karoline. Most of the time, the man would end up picking up the tab for all the young women. Then, as part of their game, they would figure out which of the women the man should date. Babcock liked to play matchmaker—and sometimes match un-maker. This type of fooling around was fun at first for many of her friends, but it often lost its appeal and resulted in rifts. Not long before Babcock disappeared, her friendships with Christina and Karoline had reached a breaking point. Babcock had moved in on Noudga’s territory, sleeping with Millard and gossiping to her friends about it.
Babcock told her uncle Thomas Ryan, who would get married two weeks before she went missing, that she wanted to bring a date to his wedding, a wealthy guy who was a pilot and photographer. But Ryan had heard that Babcock was running with a bad crowd and was worried about her showing up with a brand-new boyfriend.
Before she made her last phone calls to Dellen Millard, on July 2 and 3, 2012, Babcock phoned Nicole MacLeod—an old high school friend with whom she had recently got back in touch—looking for somewhere to stay. “I was in no position to be able to offer my home a
t the time,” Nicole later wrote on Websleuths about the July 1 call. “And that’s something that eats away at me pretty hard sometimes. I know if I have kids someday, I will be that mom that lets kids stay when they need a place to go.”
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AFTER BABCOCK DISAPPEARED, Nicole MacLeod joined the Help Us Find Laura group on Facebook, set up by Shawn Lerner. In his first post, on July 18, 2012, he wrote, “This is Laura’s friend Shawn. I logged on to her account to create this group. I am sorry if I got your hopes up when you saw she was online but I just wanted to create this group through her account so I can invite all her friends. As you may have heard Laura (‘Elle Ryan’ to some of her friends) has been missing for the past 3 weeks.”
Lerner urged anyone with any information to contact him, the police, or Crime Stoppers. And on the off chance that Babcock herself might see his post, Lerner wrote, “Laura, in case you are reading this know that we love you and are worried sick. If you don’t want to be found, you don’t have to tell us where you are. Just get in touch with someone to confirm you are safe.”
Lerner made a poster and asked for help distributing it, adding that Babcock’s father, Clayton, would cover any printing and travel costs. MacLeod volunteered to help with the poster and leaflet campaign, as did other friends. On August 4, Lerner announced: “$5000 Reward for anyone who has information that enables us to locate Laura. Cash and no questions asked. Please help us spread the word.”
Through July and August, worried friends checked in to the Facebook group, asking if there was any news and making suggestions. Dellen Millard never joined the group, but Christina Noudga and Andrew Michalski did. Noudga did not participate in any of the discussions. Michalski tweeted from his Twitter account asking if anyone had seen “Ryan.”
In the fall, another of Babcock’s friends posted her information on The Dirty (www.thedirty.com), a gossip site featuring both celebrity news and trash talk about the non-famous. Babcock had been a fan of The Dirty and read it loyally, so her friend thought it might be a good way to get a message to her. “She has not been heard from by her parents or friends since June 30 and everyone is worried sick,” the friend wrote. “Since she was last seen, there has been no activity on any of her social networking accounts, credit card, email or cellphone.”
The Dirty posting led to a clue that Babcock might be in Las Vegas, working at a strip club called the Rhino or close by. Shawn Lerner and Babcock’s mother contacted the club and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police but got nowhere. By the new year, the Facebook postings had slowed to a trickle. On one of the last posts before the news of Dellen Millard’s arrest broke, Nicole MacLeod commented, “I think about Laura a lot….I really wish I had been able to help her somehow before she went missing….The lack of coverage still disturbs me to this day.”
That all changed when Dellen Millard, the last person Laura phoned, was charged with murder. All of a sudden, her disappearance was in the headlines and her pictures were all over the news and social media. During the final week of May 2013, with new information sufficient to obtain a search warrant, police and forensic vans descended again on Dellen Millard’s farm. This time they were looking not for evidence related to the Tim Bosma case but for clues that would help Toronto Police with their reinvigorated investigations into the disappearance of Babcock and the sudden death of Wayne Millard, which had originally been deemed a suicide. Working alongside Waterloo Regional Police and Ontario Provincial Police, homicide detectives from Toronto supervised the search of a piece of land close to the barn, later described as “an area of interest.” Among other things, police used a ground-penetrating radar device. The search lasted three days and was occasionally hampered by fog and rain.
At a news conference held the following week at Toronto Police Headquarters, Detective Mike Carbone revealed to reporters that the search had yielded no new evidence. A homicide cop who had only recently been put in charge of the Laura Babcock and Wayne Millard cases, Carbone faced a barrage of questions from reporters about the earlier handling of these investigations. By the end of the twelve-minute news conference, he looked like a man whose bosses had sent on suicide mission. His situation wasn’t helped by the fact that he was wearing a dark wool jacket on a June day. His forehead glistened ever brighter as he insisted to skeptical reporters that the Wayne Millard and Laura Babcock investigations had been, in his chosen words, “thorough” and “traditional.”
Carbone remained on message, dodging the many questions about why no one had ever followed up on Babcock’s phone bill. He suggested too that there may have been a sighting of Babcock after July 4. And without anyone in the Toronto Police having given prior warning to Babcock’s parents, he said she was “known to be involved in the sex trade business as an internet escort” and had a non-traditional dating relationship with Millard.
“We were stunned,” Clayton Babcock said after the news conference. “She also had a university degree. She had her issues, but she is a very nice young woman.”
In the normally cop-friendly Toronto Sun, columnist Joe Warmington wrote that even some police officers on the case were taken aback by Carbone’s statement. “ ‘It was dirty because we don’t even really know how accurate or extensive that is,’ ” Warmington quoted an unnamed detective as saying. The detective called it nothing but an exercise by Toronto Police to “cover their butt on what they didn’t do.”
On the Help Us Find Laura page on Facebook, Shawn Lerner posted that Babcock’s life had been turned upside down in a matter of months. “I don’t know exactly when or how the drugs and this apparent involvement in the escort business started. The first I learned of either was in talking to some of her friends after her disappearance. I’m not trying to justify her actions, I just want to provide some context for what she was going through at the time. I think the police were content to close the book on this case as soon as they heard the words ‘drugs’ and ‘escort.’ I hope the public doesn’t feel the same way since we need everyone’s help to find her and bring her home safe.”
TEN
THE BROS
Dellen Millard acquired his burner cell phone in March 2013. Even though the Toronto Police had inexplicably failed to follow up with him about Laura Babcock’s last calls to his regular cell, Millard knew he might not get that lucky again. He realized that his own phone could connect him to people he didn’t want to be connected to. What he failed to understand was that the pings from his cell phone also told an important story. Early in the trial, the prosecution introduced a PowerPoint exhibit tracking the movement of Millard’s and Smich’s cell phones, as well as the new burner phone registered in the name of Lucas Bate.
The presentation began with a display of calls made from the Bate phone on the evening of Friday, May 3. Two were to men selling Dodge Ram trucks: Dennis Araujo, at 8:33 P.M., followed by Omar Palmili, at 8:36. Less than half an hour later, at 9:01, a call was made on Millard’s phone. All three of these calls bounced off cell towers near Millard’s Maple Gate home. The same pattern occurred on Saturday, May 4, as the burner phone was used to contact truck sellers while Millard made and received calls to friends on his personal phone. Once again, the cell tower information suggested the two phones were together at Millard’s home.
Andrew Michalski, Millard’s worshipful Baja companion, who was living at Maple Gate at the time, tells the court that he recalls his friend looking for a truck that weekend. Millard showed him a Kijiji ad for a black Dodge Ram 3500 pickup on his computer. “He asked me if he should steal it from the asshole or the nice guy,” Michalski says. “I told him to fuck off.”
“Why was that the response you gave?” asks prosecutor Craig Fraser.
“I didn’t think he needed to steal a truck.”
“ ‘Asshole’ or ‘nice guy.’ Did you know who he was referring to?”
“No.”
That May 4 afternoon, the burner phone had been used to call Omar Palmili, Igor Tumanenko, and Tim Bosma, and test drives were se
t up for the next day with Palmili and Tumanenko. Most likely, Tumanenko, the Russian who had served in the Israeli army, was the seller Millard referred to as “the asshole.” The nice guy could have been either Palmili or Bosma, but in the courtroom a lot of people automatically assume Millard was referring to Tim Bosma. It’s an uncomfortable moment in Michalski’s testimony, which is overall very damning for both accused.
Michalski makes a far better impression in real life than he does on Facebook. He is big and tall, with chin-length hair pulled back in a partial ponytail. On his first day of testimony, he wears a light-blue sports jacket, white shirt, and black pants. For the three days he is on the witness stand, he is accompanied in the courtroom by his mother, brother, and aunt. He is respectful of court procedures, and he and his brother allow the media to photograph them as they arrive at and leave the courthouse. He is a confident and credible witness.
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