This email was given to me by an unimpeachable source. It was sent in August 2011 from Wayne Millard to a friend. It’s not really enough material for me to write a new story, but I thought it would be of interest to those still following the Tim Bosma case and the prosecution of accused murderers, Dellen Millard and Mark Smich:
Our lease expired last april and the Toronto airport authority refused to renew it, which forced me to “remove” the old hangar – i.e. demolish it, at our expense, $600,000. However through a series of good coincident for me (it seemed like an angel was causing some things to happen) i managed to get $2 million from the airport for them to get ownership of the new hangar, (which they thought they were just going to automatically take over ownership of at lease end) the big hangar where the birthday parties were for my father, which is where air transat operates a maintenance hangar. Well, more good fortune came my way. Kitchener airport practically begged us to build a hangar at an area of their airport they want to develop and offered unheard of conditions for a lease – which we are signing onto this month – i’ve got it here on my desk looking it over, it’s really good. So, the picture is of the land being prepared for the new hangar we will build at kitchener starting this month. It’s going to be 50,000 square feet – 212 x 243’ with a 60’ high taildoor, good for 2 320s or 737s, or 1 757 or airbus 310. But who’s the tenant for this? Another piece of good luck came my way – skyservice airlines went broke last year and i’ve got their top 3 maintence people – who i happen to know from my flying days with Canada 3000, where they were then – now writing manuals for transport approval for a maintenance shop ( in today’s lingo, “MRO”, maintenance, repair and overhaul ) to do heavy maintenance on small airliners. The unknown in all this downwind sailing is whether we will get the customers we need. Well, that’s about what is going on – we hope to have the hangar finished this winter. I will send you pictures as it progresses. Hope all is well with you
Over
wayne
AnnBrocklehurst.com 
Excellent Ann (as usual). Thank you. It tends to reconcile with mutterings I have heard from others (pilots) (hearsay)
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Anne, I’m curious, did this friend of Mr. Millard given any indication that he felt Mr. Millard’s death was suspicious? Did they give any indication that the son Dellen was a bad apple? Or was completed shocked that Dellen could be accused of a of murder?
Thanks.
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You will not believe this but Wayne sent an angsty email on the eve of his 70th birthday in 2011 and the friend deleted it and then emptied the trash. A computer tech was called in to recover it (after the Bosma murder made headlines) and he said the files were overwritten and therefore there was no hope of getting it back.
I’m trying to reconcile this with the fact that we’re always hearing that anything you do on your computer is there forever.
I’d love to find an expert with more to say on the subject of recovering Outlook emails.
The friend did not know Dellen Millard, but there are some references to him in the emails that were kept and passed on to me. My interpretation of the rather scanty information is that both his parents were concerned about him, but I could be reading too much into things.
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Technically to recover data that been overwritten you would need a lab with very high tech equipment. Authorities may not have thought it was worth the cost to recover or maybe those seeking tors have been overwritten too many times.
The way most recovery programs recover data that’s overwritten is by reading bits beside the bits that have been overwritten, it’s like trying to reconstruct an object by looking at the shadow it casts. Although it’s computer science it’s not a perfect science.
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Thanks, that’s the clearest explanation I’ve heard so far.
Of course, it’s always possible that the authorities have recovered all this material from Wayne Millard’s computers.
Or there’s the possibility that after they initially declared his death a suicide, all his electronics disappeared and/or everything on them was erased.
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I’ve never heard of the techniques Brent described, but I am only a computer tech, not a data retrieval expert. Still, I don’t know how bits next to bits that have been overwritten would be relevant to the bits that have been overwritten. There is one way there could be pieces of the document still floating around on the hard-drive, though, and that’s if the page-file kicked in and started writing things that were happening to disk. The page-file is also known as ‘virtual ram’ as it acts as an extension to RAM – when the RAM fills up the page-file is activated, and in modern windows environments the RAM gets eaten up quickly with normal processes. Unfortunately modern computers are also usually equipped with a lot of RAM so Windows doesn’t access the page-file as much as it used to. Other processes like defragging of the hard drive can leave bits of old page files orphaned all over the drive, which helps provide data retrieval people with some potentially relevant data to sift through…
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Sorry, not the bits next to bits but rather the edges of those bits are read. A bit is an election state (on/off) and it will leave a sort of magnetic residue on a traditional hard drive.
A better analogy would be trying to study the sun if was constantly eclipsed by the moon, we can see the outer edge which allows us to assert certain details without having to see the whole thing.
This aside the personal computer obviously can’t be recover the data but there a chance police were able to retrieve the data either from Windows volume copy or from the mail server itself.
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Edge bits can be used to recover clock signals in noisy serial streams. If you can’t get at data because the clock signal is compromised, then yes, restoring it will give you access to the data, but if the data is over-written there is no way to recover it. A guy named Peter Gutmann claimed in 1996 in a paper that a high-powered microscope could be used to retrieve over-written data, but as you can see here, that has been debunked:
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html
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Above and below is a rudimentary description of high end lab recovery, something that probably wouldn’t be used in this case because it costs a fortune.
Also I’m not a comp. Tech although I’ve recovered data from many hdd’s and fixed many PC’s and broken phones/tablets in my spare time.
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There is a big difference between what expensive ‘high-end’ data recovery companies advertise their capabilities to be and what their capabilities actually are. Those places have ‘clean rooms’ that they use in order to open malfunctioning hard drives and pull the platters out to put them in a working hard drive. That’s the kind of job they do that will cost a fortune because clean rooms cost a fortune to install and maintain, but you still need intact data on the drive; it’s only useful if the hard drive has been physically destroyed.
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Didn’t realize the ‘Paranoid multi wipe” was no longer necessary.
http://www.howtogeek.com/115573/htg-explains-why-you-only-have-to-wipe-a-disk-once-to-erase-it/
Calvin, the labs do more than offer a clean room but your right that they are limited to what they can recover, as the article above describes that the more dense the discs get the more difficult it becomes to recover. I have preformed a disc platter transplant in my living room before, recovered my data and threw the discs out. Mechanical problem, the discs were fine but back to the topic I doubt any of this will relate to the case because even if the gutman theory was true the courts wouldn’t pay for the lengthy process to recover a single email which merely sounded ‘edgy’
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I think your conclusion is correct, I doubt the prosecution would pay much for a piece of evidence with negligible worth. As for as data recovery possibilities go, I think that Law Enforcement encourages the belief that they can pull data off compromised hard-drives in the same way they encourage the belief that polygraph tests work; it’s used as a tool to extract a confession from a suspect as the cop will say: “We have access to all the data you tried to delete which proves you are responsible for the crime, but it will take our forensics team a few days to do so. So why don’t you just come clean and admit to your role in the crime now, as a judge or jury would be more sympathetic if you admit to the crime before we prove you did it.”
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Mr. Millard didn’t sound suicidal to me in that letter. He had TOO much going on and he sounded on top of the world and looking forward to the future..
Suicide by azz!
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