Parents of Tim Bosma offer support to victim’s mother at murder trial

Not everyone walking into the courtroom would know what a confluence of horror they are entering.

Their first inkling may be when defence lawyer Dirk Derstine asks the forensic anthropologist to compare cooking a frozen turkey with incinerating a human body.

The judge cuts that line of questioning short.

But the truly awful thing - the unfathomable thing - is that in the courtroom there are two separate families who live with nightmares of their sons' bodies being incinerated. Two entirely unrelated murder cases.

The parents of Tim Bosma are there.

So is the mother of Billy Mason.

This is the trial - the retrial actually - of Jeremy Hall, accused of Billy's first-degree murder. He is alleged to have shot Billy in February 2006 as payback for Billy setting him up to rip off the Hells Angels for drugs. The Crown's star witness, Jason Lusted, has testified that he and Hall burned Billy's body - left outside for days in freezing weather - on a bonfire at Hall's farm. Lusted says they drank beer and watched the flames.

Hall was convicted by a jury at his first trial in 2013, but he appealed and was granted a second chance. This new trial was well underway when the pandemic hit and the courts were shut down. The case - the only murder trial in Hamilton paused by COVID-19 - resumed Monday.

Billy's mom, Donna Dixon sits in the courtroom listening to Tracy Rogers, the forensic pathologist, testify for the defence about the likelihood that a bonfire could obliterate a human body. Not a bit of Billy was ever found.

A fire inspector, using a sieve, found fragments of animal bone but nothing human, court heard.

However, by the time investigators chased their leads to that exact spot on Hall's farm, three years had passed.

Hall's wife, Carol Anne Eaton, swore to police under oath in 2010 that one night in February 2006 she awoke at the farmhouse to the dreadful smell of Billy's body burning. Her statement was entered as evidence at this trial.

Rogers, who appeared via Zoom, testified that: people with more body fat burn more effectively" (Billy was lean); commercial cremation happens at about 1,000 C and takes up to three hours while a bonfire has uneven temperatures and would take large amounts of wood to fuel - and even then it would be difficult to completely burn a body.

I would expect a very careful search to find at least some evidence of human bone having been there," Rogers tells the court.

Donna covers her face with her hands. At the first trial, she left the courtroom when incineration was discussed.

Behind Donna sit Hank and Mary Bosma. They have been coming to support Donna because they understand her pain in a way few others can.

Their son, Tim, was shot and killed within minutes of taking two men on a test drive of the truck he was selling. Dellen Millard and Mark Smich put his body in an animal incinerator called The Eliminator" and swept his bones and ash out when they were finished. They were convicted of first-degree murder.

But the convergence of cases doesn't end there.

The Hall trial is in Courtroom 600, the same one where the Bosmas sat for their six-month ordeal.

The judge is the same - Justice Andrew Goodman has presided over both cases - the first with a jury and the second as judge alone.

Rogers was an expert witness in both trials, albeit she testified for the Crown at Tim's trial. She crawled inside The Eliminator" and vacuumed out Tim's dust. When she spoke of this on the stand at his trial, she wept and Mary left the courtroom.

Now, without being able to see the courtroom and without knowing the Bosmas are in it, she talks about The Eliminator" again, referencing a previous case involving an outdoor animal crematorium." The Bosmas are rattled. They didn't know Tim would be talked about today.

Tuesday will bring more of the same grim evidence as Rogers is cross-examined.

It is really more than a parent can bear.

Susan Clairmont is a Hamilton-based crime, court and social justice columnist at The Spectator. Reach her via email: sclairmont@thespec.com