The Murder of Tim Bosma

Tim Bosma and the truck listing

Timothy Bosma lived near Ancaster, Ontario, with his wife and young daughter. In spring 2013, the family decided to sell his Dodge pickup truck and advertised it online. According to the Ontario Court of Appeal's later account of the case, Bosma arranged for interested buyers to come to his home on May 6, 2013.

Dellen Millard and Mark Smich arrived for the viewing, and the three men left together in the truck for a test drive. Bosma did not return home. His disappearance quickly became a major police investigation.

The investigation

Police built a circumstantial and forensic case linking Millard and Smich to Bosma's disappearance and death. The appellate judgment records that Bosma's truck was found at the home of Millard's mother, that Bosma's blood was found in the vehicle, and that surveillance footage and other evidence traced movements connected to the men after Bosma vanished.

Investigators also recovered human bone fragments from an incinerator located on Millard's farm. The prosecution argued that Bosma had been killed during the test drive and that his body was later destroyed in that incinerator. This archive does not reproduce the more graphic evidentiary details.

Competing accounts at trial

Millard and Smich were tried together and each sought to place primary responsibility on the other. Smich testified that Millard was the shooter. Millard did not testify, but his counsel argued that Smich had fired the gun. The Crown's theory was that both men acted together in a planned and deliberate murder and were criminally liable regardless of which one fired the fatal shot.

The distinction is important: the jury did not need to establish which accused physically fired the weapon in order to determine whether both were parties to a planned first-degree murder. The Court of Appeal later emphasized that the trial judge repeatedly instructed jurors to assess the evidence against each accused separately.

Convictions and sentences

On June 17, 2016, the jury convicted both Dellen Millard and Mark Smich of first-degree murder. First-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence in Canada. At the time of the Bosma convictions, each received life imprisonment with 25 years of parole ineligibility for that murder.

Millard and Smich were later convicted in a separate murder case involving Laura Babcock, and Millard was additionally convicted of murdering his father. Those distinct homicides are not fragmented into this page; this case file concerns the murder of Tim Bosma only.

The 2023 appeals

Both men appealed their Bosma convictions. In R. v. Millard, 2023 ONCA 418, released June 14, 2023, the Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed both conviction appeals. The court rejected arguments concerning bad-character evidence, closing submissions, the jury charge and other alleged trial errors, concluding that there had been no reversible unfairness.

The appellate court's judgment leaves the first-degree murder convictions intact. Separate sentencing consequences arising from the Supreme Court of Canada's 2022 ruling in R. v. Bissonnette against stacked periods of parole ineligibility affect how multiple life sentences operate, but they do not undo the Bosma murder convictions themselves.

Current status

The case is classified as Solved / Adjudicated. Millard and Smich were convicted of Tim Bosma's first-degree murder after a jury trial, and Ontario's highest court dismissed their conviction appeals in 2023. This review found no later reported judgment overturning those convictions through August 28, 2026.