HAMILTON—It doesn’t matter who actually shot Tim Bosma.

“If you are spending your time deciding who did what (inside the truck), you are missing the point,” assistant Crown attorney Tony Leitch told the jury Thursday, in his closing arguments at the first-degree murder trial of Dellen Millard and Mark Smich.

It is not the jury’s job to determine who was holding the gun on May 6, 2013, when the Ancaster father was shot inside his pickup truck, Leitch told them.

Their true task, he said, is to determine whether the evidence shows both Millard and Smich — the two men Bosma had taken for a test drive of his truck that night — had planned that murder together.

During the trial of more than four months, the accused men have pointed the finger squarely at each other, each claiming they were only there to “scope out” a truck to steal — and that a murder was not planned or expected.

But Leitch argued both knew exactly what they were doing that night — and that the plan was to steal a truck, and then kill and incinerate the truck’s owner.

“It seems absurd to murder a man over a used truck, but that’s what they did,” he said. “Killers are not always rational.”

He pointed to the morning of May 7, 2013, when Millard and Smich left the air hangar where Bosma’s truck had been stripped, and Bosma’s body had been burned in Millard’s animal cremator, and picked up Smich’s girlfriend, Marlena Meneses, in Oakville.

Meneses testified that both were “very happy,” and were celebrating the fact that “the mission went well.”

“This tells you everything you need to know about the case,” Leitch said. “They were celebrating the plan they had accomplished — the murder and incineration of Tim Bosma.”

When the two showed up at Bosma’s house for the test drive — which they had arranged using a burner cellphone — they did not cover their faces.

The defence has suggested this shows they were not intending to kill, but Leitch suggested it shows exactly that: “identification was a non-issue. Dead men don’t do photo lineups.”

But they hadn’t expected to see Sharlene Bosma and Wayne De Boer in the driveway — which is why Smich hung back in the shadows, his face obscured by his baggy hoodie, he said.

But Millard was confident, friendly, made eye contact.

“That’s the kind of guy he is ... he’s over-confident. He thinks he’s untouchable,” Leitch said.

They’d been planning this night for more than a year, he argued. They liked to steal, and their plans were escalating. He said texts show they acquired a gun and ammunition and the incinerator as “ingredients” for their lethal plan.

A week before Bosma was killed, on April 27, 2013, Millard texted Smich that he was headed to Waterloo Region: “Figure out the BBQ situation for this week.”

This is a reference, Leitch says, to the animal cremator.

He disputed the defence team’s suggestions that this was a reference to a get-together Millard was planning at his Etobicoke home. What was needed in Waterloo Region to prepare for that?

He suggested the reason Millard wanted a diesel pickup was to drive it down to the desert road race in Baja, Mexico, that May — so their deadline was approaching.

“The timetable had been set,” Leitch said. All they needed was a target.

Bosma was a “good man, a hardworking man,” Leitch said. “He did nothing to deserve the ending of his life.”

Leitch spent the morning debunking doubts raised by defence lawyers over the last two days of final arguments.

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Millard’s lawyers had questioned why, if he wanted a truck so badly, he would murder someone inside it — essentially destroying it.

Leitch agreed, “only idiots” would do so, and the plan had indeed been to kill him outside the truck — but something went wrong.

He said if Bosma had been shot outside the truck, the cleanup would have been quick.

“It was supposed to be a three-hour job,” Leitch said. Instead, it was an “all-nighter,” as Millard put it in a text message to his girlfriend, Christina Noudga, late that night.

Leitch disputed Millard’s lawyers’ theory that Bosma was killed in a struggle after Smich pulled the gun. Leitch said Bosma would never have fought these guys — he had “everything to live for.”

Leitch argued that the evidence clearly shows Millard and Smich working together to destroy the evidence; neither acted like they were afraid of the other, as they claim.

“They were in it together, all the way,” Leitch said.

The stories the co-accused have presented at trial — Smich on the stand, and Millard through his lawyers — are “fanciful theories” and “stories,” Leitch said.

He pointed to the dozens of letters Millard sent Noudga from jail, in which Millard is explicitly attempting to tamper with witnesses and encourage perjury.

This was a “carefully executed plan” by them both, Leitch stressed.

“Fortunately for justice in our community, they made mistakes. And they were caught by an outstanding police investigation.”

As he finished his submissions, Leitch reminded the jury that “Tim was kind.”

“As you retire to consider your verdict, don’t forget about Tim,” he said.

Jury members have been excused until next Friday, when they will return for the first day of the judge’s charge.

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