![Tim Bosma: The painful search for a missing man]()
The detective’s suit gave it away.
Sitting in Tim Bosma’s packed living room at 9:30 a.m. on May 14, Det.-Sgt. Matt Kavanagh came to update the missing man’s family and friends on the investigation into his disappearance. But the jeans and casual shirt he usually wore were replaced by more formal attire.
Most of Bosma’s family was there: His wife, Sharlene, sat in one chair, his father and mother, Hank and Mary, sat on a couch. Sharlene’s parents, long divorced, sat with their significant others and two of Bosma’s sisters. Eight days earlier, Bosma had climbed into his 2007 black Dodge Ram pickup truck for a test drive with two men. He never came home.
“We have evidence that confirmed Tim is dead,” Kavanagh said.
The room imploded, collapsing under the weight of the news. Screams, wails and tears filled the space between them. The slim hope that their son, husband, father and brother would come home had been shattered.
“I do have to tell you more: His body was burnt beyond recognition.”
Two lives have collided since the night of May 6, when 32-year-old Tim Bosma is believed to have died, leaving 27-year-old Dellen Millard of Etobicoke charged with his murder. At least two other suspects remain at large.
While he was missing, Bosma’s family and friends set up a war room at his rural Ancaster home, mounting a massive search that garnered national attention and reached hundreds of thousands online as police scoured a large swath of southern Ontario looking for him.
Through dozens of exclusive interviews with Bosma’s friends, the Star has reconstructed their efforts to find the man, pieced together new details on the high-flying life of Millard, and documented the chaos that gripped their communities for 10 days.
*Mike Van Houten* awoke to a text from a friend around 5 a.m. on May 7: “Mikey, Tim is missing. Have you seen him?”
Van Houten didn’t know what to make of it. After he grabbed a coffee he drove by Bosma’s house. A police cruiser sat in the long gravel driveway outside the house Bosma built a few years ago. Strange, he thought. So he turned around and drove by again. He saw Bosma’s father, Hank, in the front yard.
When Van Houten pulled in, Hank confirmed the text before breaking down in tears.
Texts and emails flew through the tight-knit Dutch community in rural Ancaster that morning, and by 7 a.m. some two dozen friends gathered. They learned from police that Bosma’s phone was turned off within a mile of the house. So they started searching.
Peter Lise, one of Bosma’s best friends, began co-ordinating the search.
“All we know is they went north,” Lise remembers telling the group. And off they went, scattering across the region, looking for something, anything, that might lead them to their friend.
The group bought a map of Ontario, set up a table on the driveway and continued organizing the search, highlighting roads that had been checked. But police told them to stop searching for their friend — they could ruin potential evidence.
So they turned their efforts to Bosma’s face and truck instead. Over the next week, they plastered his image everywhere from Windsor to Toronto. They also launched a small social media campaign: Find Tim Bosma.
*Timothy Hank Lenard Bosma* was born on Aug. 12, 1980. He grew up in a subdivision in Ancaster, where his parents, Hank and Mary, still live.
He went to Calvin Christian School before attending Ancaster High School, but spent much of his time at the Ancaster Christian Reformed Church, where he met most of his closest friends.
“He loved anything with an engine,” said Gary Kikkert, who was the best man at Bosma’s wedding.
The gang of friends would rip around the Kikkert farm in “field cars,” old beaters they’d smash up and use to run over small trees.
When Bosma wasn’t riding a motorbike or snowmobile, he was working on his career. He went to Mohawk College while working summers at his father’s heating and air conditioning business. He joined the company full time for several years, before starting his own business.
He met Sharlene online. On their first date, he rolled up to her house in his truck to take her out to dinner. It didn’t start well. When he walked around to open the passenger door, she froze.
“What’s that?” she asked. “A baby seat,” he said.
He quickly smoothed it over, explaining he had it for his many nieces and nephews. The rest of the date wasn’t much better: Sharlene, too nervous to make conversation, spent much of her time texting friends. There was no kiss goodnight. But she texted a few days later, asking him out.
“And then Tim stopped calling me,” said friend Wes Eggink, laughing. “He was too busy with Sharlene.”
They married on Feb. 13, 2009.
*Peter Lowe* showed up to the Bosma house on May 9. Lowe knew Bosma peripherally as a teenager and lost touch. When he saw the missing person sign on Facebook, he felt compelled to help out. He wouldn’t leave for eight days.
He showed up in sweat pants and an old sweater with a pair of rubber boots and a laptop. Within minutes, Lowe was placed in charge of the Facebook page.
But the inside of the grand house was limited to family members. And Lowe didn’t even know the family. He first met Sharlene when she came flying downstairs and yelled at everyone to get out. Everyone took off as Lowe fumbled with his power cord.
“You, stay!” Sharlene yelled, before lying down on the couch. Lowe set up his laptop on the kitchen table, where he would eventually work across from Bosma’s sister, Michelle.
“Our goal was to get Tim on the front pages and on national TV,” Lowe said. “If there was a chance Tim was alive, we had to get the word out.”
Sharlene debated whether she should make a statement. Kavanagh, the case’s lead investigator from the Hamilton police, did not want the family speaking to the media. (The detective did not return requests to speak to the Star.)
Lowe, who just met the family, interjected. “The perception out there is that you’re not talking because you’re hiding something about Tim,” Lowe told her.
That day, Sharlene appeared at police headquarters and begged for her husband’s return. “It is just a truck,” she said. “You don’t need him.”
“That really changed the tide,” Lowe said. “People connected with Sharlene’s passion.”
Later that day, investigators announced two crucial details: Bosma’s cellphone had been found in an industrial park in Brantford, his car spotted driving in that direction the night he disappeared.
And then the strangest twist: The day before Bosma’s disappearance, another man in Etobicoke who had posted an advertisement for a newer Dodge Ram model was contacted by the same two men. He was returned safely following a test drive.
And details of Bosma’s bizarre disappearance started to unravel, the case took hold nationally. At the news conference, police had a better description of one man they were looking for — the driver who climbed in beside Bosma. Police hoped the small word “Ambition” inked on one suspect’s wrist would be a beacon to finding him.
*Millard’s tattoo* stood out.
On May 11, the 27-year-old was pulled over on Cawthra Rd. in Mississauga, a 10- to 15-minute drive from his Maple Gate Court home in Etobicoke.
Police allege Millard was the tattooed driver they were looking for and charged him with the forcible confinement of Bosma and the theft of his Dodge Ram.
There was still no truck. And there was still no Bosma.
With the arrest, Lowe said, there was some joy in the house. There was a hope that Millard would talk. Sharlene latched on to the forcible confinement charge, hoping it meant he was still alive.
They were five days in to their ordeal.
Millard grew up on the wing of a plane, heir to an ever-expanding aviation company that was successful long before he was born to Wayne Millard and Madeleine Burns on Aug. 30, 1985.
Son of an Air Canada pilot and flight attendant, Millard grew up an only child at the leafy Etobicoke cul-de-sac with his father, his parents eventually divorcing. He attended the Toronto French School but left before graduating, a spokesperson for the school confirmed.
Millard, a lover of cars and planes since childhood, raced with a friend in the Baja 2011 in Mexico. Pictures show them sporting dyed mohawks and posing beside their yellow Jeep Wrangler.
He made history as the youngest person to ever solo pilot a helicopter in 1999.
Millard’s grandfather, Carl Millard, founded Millardair in 1963. It was a proud company, a charter outfit that catered to the automotive industry, flying parts from Toronto across North America, according to Larry Milberry, a Canadian aviation author.
Wayne Millard ran the airline with his father at the age of 21. He took over after Carl died in 2006. In 2011, with the Millardair lease running out at the Toronto airport, Wayne looked to move operations to Waterloo, building a massive hangar for $6 million.
In early November 2012, Wayne was preparing to celebrate the grand opening of his new hangar. But he would die a few weeks later in an apparent suicide.
Toronto police went to the Millards’ home and ruled out foul play. But the office of the chief coroner confirmed the investigation into his death remains open, his body cremated and interred at an unknown location. Toronto police have reopened the investigation, the Hamilton Spectator confirmed.
Based on property records alone, the fortune Millard inherited is significant.
He owned his childhood home, a six-unit property on Riverside Dr. he purchased from his father for $1.1 million in 2007 and a Vaughan condo he purchased for $392,000 in 2011. He also likely inherited an Ajax home purchased by his father in 2002 for $190,000.
He was also the part owner of a Derry Rd. home in Mississauga that was sold in 2012 for $795,000.
In May 2011, he bought a sprawling 46-hectare piece of farmland with an old barn in the community of Ayr, 26 kilometres north of the Waterloo hangar.
Bruce Nicholson, a veteran Kitchener realtor, told the Star he got a phone call from Millard about the property in 2010, saying he was looking for a place to build a home for him and his fiancée. “He seemed like a nice young man,” Nicholson recalled. “He was buying a piece of land to build his dream house on.”
Millard bought the property for $835,000, without conditions. A cash sale.
On May 7, the day after Bosma went missing, Millard bought a condo at 70 Distillery Lane in Toronto for $627,524. Ten days later, after his arrest, he transferred the condo for $1 to his mother.
*Last Sunday,***police cars swarmed a quiet street in Kleinburg surrounding a large black covered trailer parked on a driveway . Neighbours said it had appeared days earlier, on Wednesday night while they watched the Leafs lose their fourth playoff game.
Police confirmed there was a black pickup truck inside, but still no Bosma. Days later they would confirm the truck was his Dodge Ram.
Earlier that morning, Lowe decided the family needed to give another news conference. It was Mother’s Day.
“I want you to do something and I need you to say yes,” he told Sharlene. “I need Tim’s mom to go in front of the cameras.”
Mary pleaded for her son to be returned to her safely, the son who on the day he disappeared wished her a happy 60th birthday. “I love you” were his last words.
“We will cherish these words forever,” Hank and Mary Bosma wrote in a statement to the Star. “We know that no one can hurt you anymore.”
*By Monday,* with some 120 officers already committed to the ground search, they combed the hangar and farm property. Forensics vans and search and rescue tents appeared.
Sharlene sent a lot of their friends home that night to rest and be with their own families. Some of the guys had a few beers to relax. It was Game 7 of the Leafs series. Lowe got word there might be a news conference Tuesday. The family hadn’t heard anything from Kavanagh.
Lowe only told Bosma’s sister, Michelle. Sharlene and Tim’s daughter were supposed to visit, but Lowe didn’t want her to come over if a news conference was planned.
The next day the whole world would know the family’s agony, police announcing that Bosma’s body had been found in Waterloo.
Millard would be formally charged the following day as new evidence emerged that a second car had followed Bosma from his house that night. Bosma had been “targeted,” Kavanagh said. But for what purpose was, and still is, unknown. A source with knowledge of the investigation said police indicated Bosma was killed in the truck.
When Millard appeared in Hamilton court, he only spoke his name. With police, he remained silent. He plans to defend his innocence.
Sharlene is fighting,**too. To keep it together for her daughter.
Speaking publicly on Wednesday for the first time since her husband’s body was discovered, she shared her grief: “I am broken.”
Liam Casey can be reached at lcasey@thestar.ca or 416-869-4944
Jennifer Pagliaro can be reached at jpagliaro@thestar.ca or 416-869-4364
Reported by Toronto Star 1 day ago.
Family, friends and even strangers clung to the hope Tim Bosma would be found alive, but a sprawling weeklong search across the GTA ended with the discovery of the Ancaster father’s charred body.
HAMILTON – Dellen Millard appeared alert but said little as he heard in court Wednesday morning that he is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Tim Bosma.
There are more questions than answers surrounding the death of Tim Bosma, a 32-year-old churchgoing Ancaster resident.
There are more questions than answers surrounding the death of Tim Bosma, a 32-year-old churchgoing Ancaster resident.
Choking back tears, Sharlene Bosma said learning the news of her husband’s gruesome death was “the most horrifying day of my life.”
Police are now considering a “thrill kill” as a possible motive for the mysterious slaying of Tim Bosma.
Reported by canoe.ca 7 hours ago.
Nearly 10 days after Tim Bosma went missing, with one man in jail and a family left grieving, experts say police face a complex manhunt for at least two more suspects as they scour the GTA for clues.
An incinerator has been found at a farm owned by the man accused of murdering Tim Bosma, the homicide detective in charge of the investigation has confirmed.
Days before the body of Tim Bosma was discovered, Hamilton police speculated that he may have been murdered in a so-called thrill kill, a source has told the Star.
The detective’s suit gave it away.
The last sign of life was a shaggy, white dog.
Police have made a second arrest in the murder of Ancaster man Tim Bosma.
As life fades back to normal on Tinsmith Court in Kleinburg, neighbours of Madeleine Burns — mother of accused murderer Dellen Millard — are wondering whether their quiet neighbour is ever coming back.
HAMILTON—Laughter and tears flowed this morning as thousands of people gathered for Tim Bosma’s funeral at the same Hamilton banquet hall where he married his wife in 2009.