Millard called dad a failure, blamed him for business woes

Days before an aviation executive was found dead in his bed — a bullet lodged in his brain — his son called him a failure and blamed him for the financial woes the family-owned business was facing, a murder trial in Toronto heard Tuesday.

Dellen Millard, 32, a twice-convicted murderer who is serving two consecutive life sentences, is accused of killing his father, Wayne Millard, on Nov. 29, 2012.

A retired forensic detective showed court scores of text messages Millard sent after purportedly finding his father dead in bed. Jim Falconer said they were recovered from one of Millard’s computers seized from the home he shared with his father in Toronto’s west end.

At 5:56 p.m., Dellen Millard sent a text message to his friend Andrew Michalski.

“Bro please come over, I don’t want to be alone, something terrible has happened,” he wrote.

Millard texted his girlfriend in the early morning of Nov. 30 that his 71-yearold father had suffered from depression and had shot and killed himself.

At the time, Dellen Millard was working for his father, who was in the middle of transforming Millardair from a company that rented out hangars to a maintenance and repair company and had built a massive hangar at the Region of Waterloo International Airport.

“The last time I spoke to him, I told him the company’s financial troubles were his doing and that he was a failure,” Millard wrote. “Usually he tells me not to worry. But this time he said maybe I was right.”

Millard told police he last saw his father alive around noon the day before and that he stayed the night at his friend Mark Smich’s house. Phone records indicate one of Millard’s phones moved from Smich’s house around 1 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2012, to his father’s home where it stayed until shortly after 6 a.m.