An unusual suicide, coroner concedes
As Snoop Dogg once put it, “Six million ways to die — choose one.”
With all those choices, when first examining the death of Wayne Millard six years ago, the system pretty much settled on one: suicide.
Millard, the president of his family company Millardair, was found dead in bed at his Etobicoke, Ont., home on Nov. 29, 2012.
The death scene might have raised a few eyebrows.
The 71-year-old was lying on his left side, right hand under his cheek, left arm outstretched.
Were it not for the thick trail of blood on his pillow, mattress and box spring, and oh yes, the blackened hole where his left eye had once been, he looked mighty peaceful.
A paramedic or officer on scene apparently thought it might have been a traditional “G.I. (gastrointestinal) bleed,” presumably beginning at that great non-traditional start point, the eye.
The first medic on scene didn’t even notice any injuries.
Neither he nor the first three police officers on scene, including a sergeant, noticed the wood-handled revolver lying atop a Lululemon bag wedged between the bed and a dresser.
It was Dr. David Evans, the coroner, who first spotted the six-shot revolver.
As he recalled Monday, while testifying at the trial of Wayne Millard’s only child, he said something like this to the cops in the room: “‘Gentlemen, we have a gun here. Did you know this was here?’ And they didn’t.”
Dellen Millard, Wayne’s 32-year-old son, is pleading not guilty to first-degree murder in his father’s death at a judge-alone trial in Toronto.
Evans testified that he spotted the bag, and the gun on top of it, while trying to estimate how much blood Wayne had lost and if it was consistent with the G.I. bleed theory that had been reported to him.
Later, when he examined the body more closely, he noticed that Wayne’s “left eye was absent,” presumably blown to bits by the gunshot.
With no search warrant, he and the officers looked casually around the home for a suicide note, but never found one. Evans ordered an autopsy, requested toxicology tests, and made a preliminary call on the death as a suicide.
But such matters were at the time in the hands of a committee, and the committee said the tests weren’t necessary since they already had a cause of death.
Evans’ preliminary report was dated Dec. 1.
His second report, written after he’d received the autopsy report minus the toxicology tests, was dated May 17, 2013.
He still answered the bywhat-means question — coroners must answer “the five questions,” the key one is by what means the person died — with “suicide.”
A month later, his final report said the circumstances “appear consistent with death by suicide.” Evans said there was soot on Wayne’s hand, and the way his left hand was frozen in rigour, the thumb curled up, the index finger uncurled, “I thought there was a reasonable chance he had done this himself.”
Asked by prosecutor Jill Cameron if the wound’s location was “a common selection site,” Evans said it was not.
“Have you ever seen it before?” she asked.
“Through the eye, no,” said Evans.
Nonetheless, as he told Millard’s lawyer, Ravin Pillay, in cross-examination, he really “had no concerns” and thus ordered the scene released, meaning the police had to hand it back to the family.
Next to the witness stand came retired Det. Jim Hutcheon, who on the night Wayne died was one of the first two proper detectives to arrive.
He said he considered Wayne’s a “sudden death in possibly suspicious circumstances.” He was concerned at the cause of death and was properly skeptical of the reports of a G.I. bleed through the eye. He was concerned that Dellen Millard, who purportedly discovered his father dead in bed, had first called his mother, not the police. The mother, Wayne’s longtime ex-wife, then drove to the house from Kleinburg, where she lived, and then she called 911.
He didn’t consider Millard a suspect, but he was suspicious, Hutcheon said.
In fact, he said Evans, the coroner, told him he too was suspicious, and that it was “60-70 per cent a suicide, and 30-40 per cent suspicious.”
He reported all this to the boss of the homicide squad when he called to notify them of the death. The inspector told him homicide wouldn’t be attending the scene, but would follow up the next day.
Early the next morning, Hutcheon and Det. Trish Johnston video-interviewed Millard back at their station. It was a voluntary statement, Hutcheon said, and for all his declared suspicions, Hutcheon, who did most of the questioning, didn’t ask Millard why he had first called his mother and waited for her, instead of phoning police.
The interview was largely unremarkable, with Millard appearing appropriately sniffly. He disclosed his late father’s heavy drinking and bouts of depression, but didn’t lay it on too thick. At one point, he said of his dad: “He carried a great sadness with him throughout his life …. He never really wanted to share it with me. It wasn’t like he was always sad, either.”
Millard gave this statement in the early hours of Nov. 30, 2012.
It was about halfway between the two murders of which he already has been convicted: Laura Babcock disappeared in July of 2012; Tim Bosma was killed on May 6, 2013.
The case was reopened only when Toronto Police were investigating those deaths.