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HAMILTON — As Tim Bosma and his wife waited for two men to arrive at their rural Hamilton home to test drive a pick-up truck they were selling online, he asked his wife if he should go with them for the drive or let them go on their own.

“Yes you should,” his wife, Sharlene, said firmly, “because you want the truck to come back.”

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After recounting in court Monday some of the last words she had with her 32-year-old husband before he vanished on that test drive — shot dead inside the truck and his remains charred in a livestock incinerator, prosecutors say — she broke down, needing to pause her testimony at the opening day of the first-degree murder trial of two men charged with the killing.

Groans of sadness were heard around the packed courtroom.

Bosma’s disappearance, public search and the eventual news of his death in May 2013, triggered an inordinate reaction, not only in Hamilton but around the world, because of the good-guy image of Bosma as a quiet, family man with a young daughter, the banal way he and his alleged killers intersected, and the profile of one of the men now charged with his murder.