For Sharlene Bosma, the ‘new normal’ begins at last
After excruciating months in the courtroom, her focus shifts to the future
A metal gate looms at the foot of Sharlene Bosma’s rural Ancaster driveway.
Black fabric cloaks the iron bars so you cannot see through from Trinity Road. Anyone approaching must be buzzed in.
“Never again will a stranger walk down my driveway,” Sharlene, 36, said Saturday, looking out at the gate from her front porch, during an interview with The Spectator just one day after her husband’s killers were convicted of first-degree murder.
She put up that gate almost immediately after Tim Bosma was killed.
There are obvious ways around it since it only spans the width of the driveway. Someone could cut across the fields if they really wanted to — though cameras and an alarm system are also part of her security arsenal.
It is an imperfect barrier, but it makes her feel safe. It is meant to keep out the “evil” that once walked up that driveway — the kind she didn’t know could exist in strangers.
Because it was strangers who took her husband away from her on May 6, 2013. Those “monsters” walked up to her garage and looked her in the eyes and smiled before they left the house that night with Tim.
He was just looking to sell his pickup truck. But they shot him in that truck and killed him, and then they incinerated his body in an animal cremator while Sharlene and their family and friends frantically looked for him.
It took eight days to learn what happened to him. And even then, she was given few details about his horrific end. Because she was also a witness. During the months of pretrial motions and legal arguments leading up to the joint trial of Dellen Millard and Mark Smich — now convicted killers
— Sharlene couldn’t be in the courtroom. And family couldn’t tell her what they heard.
When the Crown gave its opening statements to the jury on Feb. 1, laying out the case, Sharlene was not there. As she sat in the courthouse’s “familyfriendly room” waiting to be called to give testimony, she was painfully aware that the public was learning information about her husband’s death that she had not yet heard.
Then it was her turn to testify. As soon as she finished on the stand that day — the first of close to 100 witnesses who would be called — she took Hamilton police Staff Sgt. Matt Kavanagh aside. She wanted all of the details, and she wanted to hear it from him.
“I knew he wouldn’t soften it,” she says.
And from that day, for the next five months, she was in the front row of the gallery in Courtroom 600, absorbing every excruciating detail of her husband’s murder.
She saw the photos of the blood spatter in his truck. She watched video surveillance of his killers’ route that night, and the gruesome details we were told the clips showed. She read the mass of digital evidence, the text messages between the two murderers as they planned their lethal “mission.”
As she sat day after day looking at the backs of their heads — and then Smich’s face, when he took the witness stand — she just kept asking why.
“How could you do this? I don’t understand what drives a human being to do something like this to another human being — a stranger.”
She spent many hours mentally calculating how quickly she could jump the barrier and get to them.
“I remember thinking, ‘I could do it,’” she says.
She fought crying, because she says that is a personal emotion, and frankly, she was tired of sharing herself with strangers. But she never once left the room.
“There were a couple of times that I wondered, how much more of this can I take? And a few times I just closed my eyes,” she says.
But she stayed. Others couldn’t. Tim’s mother, Mary, fled in tears during some of the tougher moments — and Sharlene is glad she did.
“As a mom, she grew those bones. They grew in Mary,” she says, referring to the forensic evidence about Tim’s remains, found in the bottom of the incinerator emblazoned with the name “The Eliminator.”
“It’s different for a mom. It’s a different connection, a different feeling.”
Sharlene is of course herself a mother.
The couple’s daughter — of whom she is fiercely protective, consistently shielding even her name from the media — is five, the spitting image of Tim.
She knows her dad died; that he was taken by “bad men” and is not coming back. But she is of course much too young to understand the complexities of his senseless and random death. She knows her mom was in court every day, and understood that there would be lawyers and a judge, and that the bad men were going to be “punished.” And now she knows that part is over. But the little girl has no memories of her father, Sharlene says. She will point at photos and claim to remember, but Sharlene knows she can’t. She was just two and a half when her father was killed.
Sharlene knows more questions will come with time. And that one day she’ll be old enough to use a computer, and search for answers herself online.
Sharlene kept notes during the trial, tucked away to share with her daughter when the time is right. And she has saved letters and cards from friends along with photos and videos so she will always know who her father was. That has been Sharlene’s driving force throughout all of this — to uphold the legacy of who Tim was in life, not just in death.
“This is not the Dellen Millard story or the Mark Smich story. This is Tim’s story,” Sharlene says of their life, which has for three years become something of a public spectacle.
On Friday night after the guilty verdicts came in, she threw a party. They drank champagne and toasted to Tim and had a bonfire in the yard. For the first time in a long time, they had something to celebrate. They’ve smiled, sure, and laughed — though sometimes that has to be forced. But this was a victory. This was justice.
Tim’s murderers will be locked up for life.
But on Saturday, it was quiet again on Trinity Road. The first day of their new normal.
As the dog roamed the field and her daughter played inside with her parents, she had coffee on the porch and reminisced about the last three years.
“You know where I’m not going to be Monday? Court,” she says with a grin.
She’s tried hard to keep life normal for her daughter throughout the trial. She met with her teacher and principal and even her bus driver, who she says were an immense support in helping her “keep an even keel.”
“The minute I came home (each day), I wasn’t Tim Bosma’s widow. I was a little girl’s mom,” she says.
With the trial now over, there will surely be a void for the Bosma family, without the hectic ritual of court to focus on and as the dozens of friends and family who have surrounded her family each day go back to their own lives. But Sharlene says she has long been ready to move forward with hers as well.
“I don’t love being constantly surrounded by people ... I need to retreat, I need my own space. To process information, I have to do it alone,” she says, of finding relief in silence.
“It was Tim who was the social butterfly.”
But she is grateful for the endless support she has had — not just from family and friends and her church community, but even from perfect strangers. She is uncomfortable with the attention, but recognizes how much Tim has come to mean to so many people.
In a statement to the media outside the courthouse Friday afternoon, Sharlene declared to the world that “our story does not end here.”
She also acknowledged that the hard work begins now.
“A lot of people think, well, the trial is over, it’s over. I think people have this idea that you’re supposed to sit in a room and cry every day. But life’s not over. I have every intention to keep going.” she says.
“It will never stop being hard, but as long as the moments where we’re laughing outweigh the moments where we’re crying, that to me is living well.”
She has thought about moving away — perhaps back to Baden in Waterloo Region, where she is from. But she put down her roots here when she built a life with Tim. Ancaster and the Trinity Road house they built together — even after what happened there — is home.
She says some of Tim’s friends still have trouble coming by the house. And she still sees people slow down as they drive by — which annoys her. But that’s what the gate is for. The world keeps turning, she says. “You never move on, you move forward. To me, there’s a huge difference. I’m never going to leave that part of me behind, Tim is always going to be with me. Because for a brief flash of time, we were a ‘we.’ There was an ‘us,’” she says.
That “us” lives on now in Tim’s Tribute, the charity that Sharlene started in his name a year after his murder. Through it, she has launched The Healing Tree, a support network for families who’ve lost loved ones to homicide.
It is part of her healing, and it’s another way in which Tim’s giving legacy is able to live on. When the program was first launched, she was the one being coached and prepared for what was to come. With the trial now behind her, she is ready to be a support for others.
But her family is not fully done with the court system yet.
In November, she and her family and friends — the “Bosma Army” as they’ve come to be known around the John Sopinka Courthouse — will be back for the trial of Millard’s girlfriend Christina Noudga, who is charged with being an accessory after the fact to Tim’s murder.
“Her trial is the closing chapter,” she says. And she is ready for that.
And there is the prospect of appeals by Millard and Smich.
Millard and Smich — whose lawyer has already said he will appeal this conviction — are also charged with first-degree murder in the death of Toronto woman Laura Babcock. She was romantically linked to Millard before she disappeared in the summer of 2012.
Millard is also accused of first-degree murder in the death of his father, Wayne, whose November 2012 death was originally ruled a suicide but was then revisited by police after he was charged in the Bosma case.
Sharlene won’t say if she’s been in touch with the Babcock family, out of respect for their privacy. But she says she feels “horrible” for them.
“Thinking about for how long they didn’t know what happened to her ...” She trails off. “It’s only because of Tim that they know.”
She doesn’t yet know if she will attend that trial.
“Do I want to look at them (Millard and Smich) again? I don’t know. I’m not rushing to do that again,” she says. But she is open to going if the Babcock family needs that support.
On the final day of the trial, after the verdicts came down but before sentencing, Millard glared at Sharlene as he entered the courtroom. He did it a few times throughout the trial, she says, and she always held his gaze.
But this time, she gave him a subtle but satisfied smirk. As his eyes grew and his stare hardened, the crowd around her jeered him into turning around.
“I am not afraid of you,” was her message.
Sunday marked Father’s Day. She and her daughter were to go alone to visit Tim at the cemetery where a heartbreakingly small amount of his remains are buried.
“For a long time I was there all the time,” she says of his gravesite. “And then at one point, I just felt like ‘he’s not here.’”
She spoke to Tim’s father, Hank, about that feeling. Home is where she feels his presence. And that is why she stays.
Throughout all of this, much has been made about the Bosmas’ Christian faith. It has carried them through this excruciating experience, and is what propels them forward now, with another trial on the horizon in the fall.
But that does not mean Sharlene Bosma is willing to forgive her husband’s murderers. His death was absolutely senseless. “It’s not my responsibility to forgive them,” she says.
“That’s up to God.”
You never move on, you move forward. To me, there’s a huge difference. I’m never going to leave that part of me behind, Tim is always going to be with me. SHARLENE BOSMA