Woman testifies Smich blamed co-accused in Bosma slaying
Ex-girlfriend Meneses tells court he admitted: ‘Dell murdered him’
HAMILTON— A panicked Mark Smich told his thengirlfriend that Dellen Millard murdered Tim Bosma, the woman testified Thursday.
Marlena Meneses, 22, said she and Smich were watching the news on May 10, 2013, when Millard’s name appeared on the screen — the report said he had been arrested in the Tim Bosma case. She freaked out and confronted Smich.
“He was like, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t really around him. He did everything, he did everything,’ ” Meneses recalled on the stand.
Millard, 30, and Smich, 28, are co-accused in the death of Bosma, who left his home on May 6, 2013, to take two men for a test drive in his pickup truck. He never returned. The Crown says Bosma was shot in his truck before his body was burned in an incinerator.
Testifying at their first-degree murder trial, Meneses — who wore a blue-and-white floral blouse and black high heels to court — said she knew Millard and Smich had plans to steal a truck.
They told her so on May 5, 2013, and Smich men- tioned it to her again on the morning of May 6.
She didn’t hear from her boyfriend after that until he and Millard came to pick her up at her sister’s around 8 a.m. the next day. When she got into Millard’s GMC Yukon, she said the pair seemed ready to “celebrate.”
“They were really happy . . . they just said the mission went well,” Meneses recalled in her testimony.
She didn’t know specifically what the mission was, she said, but figured it had to do with their plans to steal a truck.
Meneses was 18 at the time. She had been dating Smich for about a year — it was love at first sight in a Tim Hortons, the trial heard — and she had dropped out of high school shortly after they started dating, just a few credits short of her diploma.
She described Smich and Millard like “brothers.”
“I would say Mark cared for Dellen more than he cared for other people,” she said Thursday. “He was in love with him.”
When Meneses and Smich learned of Millard’s arrest on May 10, she said Smich grabbed her phone — Millard had drugs in his house that he needed to get, he told her.
Later, after the drugs eventually made their way to Smich the next day (through mutual friends of his and Millard, the jury has heard), Meneses testified Smich told her there was also a gun in a tool box.
Alarmed, she confronted Smich about what happened to Bosma — who, at this point, was still considered missing.
“He told me he was ‘gone, gone,’ ” she testified. “He said that Dell murdered him . . . that he shot him . . . he told me he did nothing, that Dell did it all.”
Assistant Crown attorney Craig Fraser asked Meneses if Smich had told her what “gone, gone” meant.
“I believe he told me that they burned him,” she recalled.
Smich eventually got rid of the gun, she said. First he tried to sell it. Then he hid it.
“He told me he wrapped it in duct tape and buried it somewhere . . . in the forest,” she said.
Meneses said she urged Smich to go to the police — but he wanted to go to his sister’s wedding the next weekend. But even after the wedding, she said, he did not go to the authorities.
“I said, ‘You can come clean, you can go to the police . . . there’s a family out there that’s missing a father and that’s not fair. You need to give this family the proper closure,’ ” she said.
But, as Fraser pointed out, she did not go to the police either — despite what she knew. She agreed.
“I did nothing. I regret it. I should’ve. I could’ve stopped so much if I had gone to the police,” Meneses said, tearing up on the stand as Bosma’s family cried in the front row.
Meneses recalled that on May 22, 2013, while walking in Oakville with her boyfriend, police came seemingly out of nowhere and tackled them. They were both handcuffed and taken away.
Smich was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Meneses will be back on the stand Monday for cross-examination.