Tim Bosma trial: Blood stains found on inside and outside of truck
Dellen Millard, 30, and Mark Smich, 28, facing 1st-degree murder charges
Tim Bosma's family sat stone-faced in a Hamilton courtroom Thursday as a police detective explained how investigators discovered blood stains on the inside and outside the Ancaster, Ont. father's truck.
It was a sombre end to the second week of testimony in the Superior Court trial of two men charged with killing Bosma, 32, whose burned remains were found days after he disappeared after taking his truck out for a test drive with potential buyers on May 6, 2013.
Dellen Millard, 30, and Mark Smich, 28, are both facing first-degree murder charges.
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Halton Regional Police Det. Const. Laura McLellan, who was among the officers who did the preliminary identification work on the truck, testified that 64 swabs of blood from the truck and trailer in which it was found were sent to the Centre of Forensic Sciences for further examination.
Police located the trailer in the driveway of Millard's mother following a tip from a neighbour.
"When we opened up the trailer … we could see blood on certain exhibits," McLellan said, including on the truck's centre console, on the dash, in a rear wheel well and on a tarp in the truck's bed.
Blood was also found splattered across the muffler and underneath the front passenger door.
"When we opened it up, along the very bottom edge of the weather stripping ... there were a lot of various blood stains along the bottom," she said.
Blood was Bosma's, Crown alleges
McLellan did not testify whose blood was found. That's the responsibility of officials at the Centre for Forensic Science, and they have not yet testified.
However, according to the Crown's address at the start of the trial, Bosma's blood and DNA were found inside the truck.
A spent .380 gun cartridge casing was also found inside the truck, while the truck's charred front seats were found sitting in the trailer.
The jury has previously heard testimony that Millard's fingerprints were found on the rear-view mirror of the truck and on the driver-side door.
There were also 12 "handler DNA" spots swabbed inside the truck, court heard – including door handles, the steering wheel and the gear shift where skin cells and other evidence can be found.
Photos McLellan took that were shown in court Thursday afternoon have not yet been made a formal exhibit, and so aren't yet available publicly.
Cellphone records integral part of case
The locations of cellphones belonging to Millard, Smich and their girlfriends during crucial times in the investigation were explained in painstaking detail earlier on Thursday.
Continuing from where he left off on Wednesday afternoon, Phillip Wilkinson, who works as an intelligence analyst with Ontario Provincial Police, created an extensive presentation that mapped the cellphones registered to Millard, Smich, "Lucas Bate" (likely a bogus name), Smich's girlfriend Marlena Meneses, Millard's girlfriend Christina Noudga, and Bosma.
According to the presentation, Millard's phone and the Bate phone were pinging off cell towers close to each other at similar times on the night Bosma disappeared.
You can watch a video version of that part of the presentation here (please ensure HD viewing is enabled for best stream quality and legibility):
On Thursday morning, Wilkinson also laid out the evening of May 9 — the night the trailer containing Bosma's truck was moved to the home of Millard's mother in Kleinburg, Ont.
You can watch a video of that part of the presentation here (please ensure HD viewing is enabled for best stream quality and legibility):
GianLuca Consiglio, who lives across the street from Millard's mother's home, previously testified that he saw the headlights of a truck that was positioning a trailer in the driveway across the street late in the evening of May 9.
The trial resumes Tuesday morning.
CBC reporter Adam Carter is in the courtroom each day reporting live on the trial. You can view a recap of his live blog here: