Melanie Bos leaves Oshawa court with her mother on Tuesday. The GM senior manager is accused of attempting to torch her fiance's home.
RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STARThat day, nearly three years ago, an unlikely rendezvous occurred at the fast food joint.
Bos’s husband met her lover.
Related: Love affair spawned at car plant crashes and burns
James Hoy, a retired union leader at GM in Oshawa, had been dating Bos, a manager at the same plant, for nine months. Hoy was under the impression her husband was dead. Not so, he learned.
Bos was arrested the next day in the driveway of the home she shared with her lover, the home police allege she tried to burn down while he slept.
An Oshawa judge heard these details in court Tuesday as the Crown opened its case against Bos, who is on trial for arson and mischief.
The defence will argue Hoy set two fires himself.
“I’m sorry that I was a lousy wife,” Bos told a police detective in an interrogation video admitted as evidence. “But last I heard being a lousy wife was not against the law.”
In the video, the 45-year-old woman admitted she had made errors in judgment when it came to relationships with men, but balked at any suggestion she started a fire.
“Just because I’ve lied to my husband does not mean I set a fire at Jim’s house,” she said, her voice rising as she repeatedly denied the accusation. “You cannot possibly have evidence of that.”
In the video, Bos said she never told Hoy her husband was dead, though she admitted she lied to Hoy’s friends about her marriage.
Bos also vehemently denied the suggestion she poisoned her husband’s orange juice, a claim the detective said he had been investigating for months. No charges were ever laid.
Bos and Hoy worked together at GM nearly every day from the mid-1990s until he retired in 2007, the former union leader testified.
Hoy said he knew Bos was married, but that in the early 2000s she told him she had gotten divorced. Hoy had never met her husband.
The relationship between Hoy and Bos was strictly professional, he said, until the fall of 2008 when he asked her out on a date.
From there, the love affair “streamlined.” Though they kept separate residences, the couple spent most of their time together at his place. Almost immediately, Hoy said, they started buying investment properties together.
“Most of the people who knew me thought I was jumping into it pretty quick and whatnot,” he said.
In February 2009, Bos cancelled a shopping trip to Boston with her lover’s friends because, Hoy said, her ex-husband had died suddenly while in bed with his new girlfriend.
Hoy said Bos spoke at length about funeral arrangements and the circumstances of the supposed death, the result of a rare heart defect.
On a trip to Cuba in April, Bos and Hoy got engaged.
Throughout the spring of 2009, they bought several investment properties together in and around Prince Edward County.
The prosecution’s case centres around one property — a church in Picton — for which the Crown will argue Bos was to come up with a $100,000 down payment, but never did. The fire was to be a diversion from the payment she couldn’t make, the Crown will argue.
The fire Bos is charged with setting, a relatively small blaze that broke out inside the wall of Hoy’s 150-year-old home in Courtice on June 30, 2009, was discovered in the early-morning hours, after Bos and Hoy had been in a fight.
Earlier that night, the couple had been cleaning up after another small fire was discovered in the garage, court heard. Bos left the house and came back when Hoy was asleep.
Soon after she crawled into bed, Hoy smelled smoke and the pair got up to investigate.
The small fire did not spread and police were only called in to investigate days later, after Hoy discovered a small hole in the wall that appeared to have a charred paper towel stuffed into it. Fire officials later determined the blaze was indeed set on purpose, court was told.
In the video statement, Bos claimed Hoy owed her tens of thousands of dollars and suggested he was the one who set the fire because he needed the insurance money.
It is unclear at this early stage in the trial why Bos would have allegedly set the fire if she was in the house at the time, and whether or not her husband suspected anything, with his wife spending most of her time at Hoy’s place.
The circumstances that led Hoy and Bruce Bos to meet at the Burger King are also unclear, but whatever happened that day — July 8, 2009 — the statements both men gave to police the next day led to the arrest of the woman they say was leading a double life.
Bos now goes by her maiden name, Chandler, but is being tried under her married name. Outside court, she said she is still employed by GM but has been on sick leave since late last year.
The trial continues Wednesday before Justice Bryan Shaughnessy.
A messy split
Love affair spawned at car plant crashes and burn
Trial set for auto exec after love affair goes up in flames
No comments:
Post a Comment